Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Auriane found this too much to consider, just then. “It’s all such monstrous madness,” she whispered. “No one wants Ramis’s staff less than I do.”

  “It’s no matter of your wanting. The path to Ramis was set for you at birth.”

  “There are quite a few who don’t agree, Gunora. I’ve violated more sacred laws than there are trees in this grove, and I’ve every intention of violating a few more. I don’t suppose it would help matters if I just sent Sawitha a message, telling her she can have the cursed office. I’ve no wish to sit where Ramis sits.”

  “That’s not the way of things. Ramis chooses. Not you. Not I. Ramis and the Fates. I was sent a dream of you, Auriane, right before you came. I saw nine fires. These were for the nine years you have wandered in a foreign land. For this year, there was no fire. On this year, you either die, or return to us.”

  AVENAHAR, IVALDE, AND Hildigun sat on freshly flayed cowhides, before the pool. Its surface was a mystery in the starlight, black and still as well water. They had been commanded to keep their gazes fixed upon it throughout the night.

  The maids had been ordered to fast for a day, and by now, hunger was a claw digging into Avenahar’s stomach. She knew she must put her whole spirit into a mighty effort to do well, if she was to do honor to her mother. The thought goaded her, again and again: And when your mother’s more than mortal, this requires more-than-mortal effort. She stared searchingly into the rustling darkness, but no marvelous knowings came—she saw only the ungiving night. The pool was a bald, unblinking eye, mocking her, telling her nothing. She knew no moments of grace, only the stiffness brought by the ever on-stretching time of sitting, as she became more cold, more hungry, more wet. A panicked sadness began to settle over her: More than this was expected of Auriane’s daughter. As the long night progressed, Avenahar became near certain that the black and fathomless pool harbored monsters. She resolved to sit still and be eaten by them, if necessary. She could not disgrace herself, or her mother. . . .

  Avenahar had arrived in this place with a victor’s confidence, but by nightfall she felt chastened and small. The elderwomen seemed to reserve their most damning glares for her. She thought she’d acquitted herself adequately through the opening rites. But during the spells for protection, she’d been reluctant to taste the wolf’s blood. The other maids were accustomed to such things; she was not. Gunora had become so indignant over this, Avenahar feared she’d be banished from the rites. And once, she’d overheard Hildigun refer to her as “that coddled villa whelp,” uttered with such contempt that Avenahar felt a bolt of shame for the warm floors on which she’d walked, the marble-encased ease in which she’d grown to womanhood. Ivalde and Hildigun knew all the living, changing tales being passed about the Chattian villages. The tales Avenahar knew were mummified fragments preserved in bookrolls. And both her fellow initiates had exhibited marked gifts for divining. Avenahar was beginning to believe her own spirit-eye was blind.

  And once, after surprising Hildigun in close conversation with Ivalde, Avenahar thought she’d heard herself called the “child of a Roman slave.” This she found both horrifying and peculiar, and she concluded, finally, she must have misheard Hildigun’s words.

  Dawn poured into this low place, rendering the pool harmless again. Avenahar felt a wash of relief; now it was just an outsized coin, round, flat, and metallic, as it reflected a cold, iron sky. Soon after first light, an elderwoman who had just returned from the village with more provisions dropped a loaf of freshly baked bread on the path behind the girls, not more than ten steps from their sitting-out place. All three could smell it; to the fasting maids, the moist aroma was seductive as a Nix’s song. Avenahar shut her eyes; with excruciating clarity, she tasted its comforting, nutty softness.

  No one was about. Avenahar heard Ivalde stirring from her place. With the stealth of a squirrel Ivalde edged toward the bread and seized it. She first offered some to Avenahar and Hildigun. After both silently refused it, Ivalde bit into it like a beast and devoured the whole loaf herself. When Gunora returned to lead them back to the fire, Hildigun told the elderwoman of Ivalde’s disobedience.

  Avenahar was surprised by Gunora’s response. “You have broken silence,” Gunora interrupted Hildigun, iron in her voice. When a flustered Hildigun protested that Gunora had just told them they could speak, Gunora said, “No. You have broken a greater silence.” Abruptly, she walked away. Avenahar noted carefully that Gunora seemed far more displeased with Hildigun, so quick to betray another’s weakness, than she was with Ivalde, who had succumbed to hunger. Avenahar knew, then, they were not being tested in an ordinary way. She began to suspect the bread had been dropped near them purposefully.

  Soon after, as they trod the path back to the fire, Gunora saw the glint of a bronze medallion Avenahar was wearing, which she’d bartered for in the village beyond the hill, to the dismay of her mother. It depicted the head of a wolf; the villagers claimed it had fallen from the harness of Witgern’s horse.

  “You must not wear that in this place,” Gunora told her, after holding it close to examine it. “It carries the taint of killing.”

  “It carries the taint of freedom,” Avenahar said, facing Gunora with a proud, quiet lift of her head. “In all the world, only Witgern fights for us. I won’t take it off.”

  For tense moments, Avenahar gamely resisted the elderwoman’s baleful glare. Gunora had a face like a balled fist, blunt and pugnacious. Her worst damning looks would be good for igniting tinder, Avenahar thought. At the last, it was as though Gunora’s gaze had greater muscular strength; Avenahar felt she’d been mentally thrown to the ground. With an angry flourish, Avenahar removed the medallion, then strode off to bury it beneath a tree for later retrieval.

  She didn’t know Gunora was pleased with her and was smiling privately at her back.

  Ah, yes, the fire is there, Gunora was thinking. But because she doesn’t know where to direct it, it burns out.

  The nights and days turned, and more tests and teachings were given. They were taught the proper prayers to utter while lighting a hearthfire. They were shown how to summon the Ancestresses, and the rudiments of reading their will in fluttering leaves. They heard tales of the deeds of the great seeresses. One day, they were sent into the forest to hunt for the Nine Herbs, then asked to explain the nature of the goddess or god sovereign over each. Avenahar knew the Nine Herbs from her mother’s lessons, but because she did not have a close knowledge of this land, she was last to find them. So it was with every task given; she walked many steps behind her two sisters.

  I dishonor my mother and I disgrace myself. The thought came more strongly with each day. How could I ever have thought myself worthy to live the grand and illustrious life she lived?

  The soup got richer. The moon swelled. The Middle Fire roared.

  FOR AURIANE, THE time was a prayer offered to the Ancestresses. Through the days, she strove with all her mind to give strength to Avenahar. But at night, in the solitude of her leafy shelter, she felt a cold so great it burned, as if she had been cast naked onto a snowbank. She’d not passed many nights sleeping singly, these last seven years. She fought and failed to conjure the presence of Marcus, pressed close, warm as a noontide sun. She felt she’d bedded down in a stone sarcophagus as words she wanted to say to him in the night echoed hollowly back to her. In the intelligent dark of the forest night, both alternatives—yielding to his plan or following her own—were the same: brutal, grotesque, impossible. She knew, then, that she and Marcus had grown together like old vines, with branches fused and all their fine tendrils intricately interwoven.

  On the sixth day of the ceremony, a rider came from the village of the Boar—her mother’s village—bearing the response Auriane had been awaiting from her mother, Athelinda. The message the boy spoke was stark and bare, but Auriane clearly heard questing and longing in the empty spaces between her mother’s words:

  “I am well if you are well. Yes, both come. Do not take the West Fores
t track. Dangers await that you do not know. Come by the rivers. Stay in the deep forest. Do not come to the Hall; I am being watched. When you arrive, don’t despair at what you see; all is not lost, we have helpers in the forest. We look over the fields with gladness because you return.”

  ON THE SEVENTH day, Avenahar, Ivalde, and Hildigun were dressed in the skins of boars, and taken at dusk to the low cave that overlooked the pool. There they would sit through the night within the living darkness of this earthen temple. Before Gunora left them, she offered to each girl a horn brimming with a drink she called the “mead of remembering.” Gunora told them she had called up the great Boar Spirit; the maids were to ride the Boar down to the realms below. Avenahar felt a gathering unease as they were told that ancestors so distant as to have no names would come to have speech with them. The three were to remember what visions might come of a future life, so they could tell the elderwomen and seek their advice.

  The maids found their places in the cave and settled onto their cowhides, positioned too far apart to draw comfort from one another’s presence. As night shadows edged toward the cave’s mouth, eager to join with the greater blackness within the cave, each maid faced that encroaching tide alone.

  When the sun abandoned them and they were engulfed, Avenahar fought panic. Damp cave walls pressed close. She felt she was wedged at the bottom of a well. Scaled hands would reach out and pull her into a clammy embrace.

  And what was happening behind them? The back of the cave was horribly alive. Avenahar broke into a light sweat. Caves harbored bottomless shafts to the world below; all manner of unholy things might seep up through rocky crevices.

  Ivalde’s occasional muffled whimpers further fed Avenahar’s terrors.

  When Avenahar finally discerned fragile starlight filtering in through the mouth of the cave, her mind reached for it and clung to that pale light, as if to the hand of a rescuer.

  Then she heard a furtive crackling sound, just outside the cave.

  What night-creature crept close? Some gnome formed of living rock, coming to punish them for driving him out of his cave?

  Or was it something without the sense to be furtive, something . . . dead? The walking dead were abundant in these woodland places, far from the protective rites regularly performed in the villages.

  Her breathing became shallower; she drew in her shoulders in an instinctive attempt to conceal herself. She was seated closest to the cave’s mouth; the thing out there wasn’t more than ten steps off from her.

  She heard the crackle of another cautious step; then whatever it was, man or ghoul, halted again.

  A tear of fright came. This was too much to bear.

  “Avenahar.”

  A ghoul that knew her name?

  A ghastly shape was silhouetted against the stars—a head that seemed to sprout snakes. The man-thing lurched toward her.

  Avenahar shrieked.

  Chaos descended. From above came barking shouts from the warriors positioned on the ridge as they spilled down toward the cave. From very close came the snapping, crashing sounds of someone making a sloppy retreat. Light jerked crazily through trees as elderwomen bearing torches hurried to the cave.

  Then Gunora and Walberga were there, and, Avenahar was most relieved to see, her mother. After Avenahar had told it all, Gunora asked, “You’re certain it was not a night vision?”

  “It was a man. I could smell him, he reeked of horsehides and rot. He knew my name! He was right there—”

  While the elderwomen questioned her and comforted her, the warriors from Sigibert’s band searched about in the dark outside the cave. They found nothing. For the rest of the night, the warrior-sentinels took places closer to the cave. Avenahar returned to her cowhide, and the maids were left again in darkness. Avenahar’s mind was in ferment. What had he wanted of her?

  And no sooner were they alone than Avenahar heard Hildigun’s low, husky laugh. Evidently the older girl thought Avenahar betrayed weakness by crying out. Avenahar felt a flash of wrath but kept silent. She had not thought any sort of laurel was to be won in a womanhood ceremony, but Hildigun apparently did—and Hildigun seemed certain that laurel would fall to her.

  I’ll not cry out again, no matter what I see. She was determined to be at home in the night. It felt like a physical effort. “Night was first mother of the world,” she told herself, imagining Auriane would be proud of her for thinking that. After a time, Avenahar realized these thoughts were busying her, but bringing her no peace. A deep, dragging hopelessness settled over her as she stared out miserably into darkness. The night expanded to a month, then shrank to a moment, while she waited with growing impatience for a vision of future days that refused to come.

  Maybe I have no future days, she thought as she stared at all that taunting, visionless blackness. The spirits of this land do not want me.

  I’ve no right to be here.

  Perhaps Auriane isn’t even my true mother.

  For comfort, she found herself fumbling in her tunic for the amulet of earth that Auriane had passed on to her. She held tightly to the smooth, well-worn pouch of leather that had known the touch of Ramis herself.

  She gave a small gasp of amazement. It felt warm. Surely her fevered senses deceived her.

  But that warmth lent her the steadiness to try a method of contemplation her mother had taught her, which Auriane had learned from the great prophetess. It was called the Ritual of Fire; it was a way of banishing all word-knowledge through envisioning fire, and becoming pure, empty memory. Avenahar’s first attempts were unsteady, but gradually, they gained momentum. Her strenuous imaginings conjured frail flames, pale but definite—they had their own life.

  Something gently collapsed in her mind. Common words had no meaning. Enemy . . . tribe . . . cave . . . stars . . . the names of things were noises. It was terrifying in a way Avenahar could not have described, like losing a horizon line that ran, not just from sea to sea, but through every thought birthed by the mind. But she didn’t struggle against it. After a time, she felt soundless rhythms coiling up from deep in the earth, then passing through her body; she’d been taken up into a great, thumping heart. She was seized with a rapture of the mind that was keen and extravagant and full of hope. Now she had no fear of somber places; she was the dark. She was turning and diving in the pool below. She beat long wings and glided low over night-drenched hills. The cave, the rocks, the shadowed trees emitted a furry ghostlight that beckoned her to a home she’d forgotten.

  After an unknown stretch of time, Avenahar began to realize there was a fire. Out there, before the cave.

  Avenahar felt its heat.

  She distinctly heard a log shift. And smelled the rich, sweetly astringent, cleansing smell of burning pine.

  Had she tumbled into the world of the dead? Was this just some powerful dream?

  No. Her eyes were watering.

  Why did Ivalde and Hildigun not see it? Were they asleep? She opened her mouth to speak to them, but found herself mute as a beast.

  Gradually, she discerned elongated shadows moving round that fire. Oddly, she felt no fear. Slowly, the forms solidified into women, surging gracefully around the fire, swaying, dancing. Two wore masks—the gold-plated head of a sow, a falcon’s head. They took brazen, ground-eating steps, moving with a wild assurance close to recklessness; they shouldered the world aside as they lunged and spun. It suggested a nature that could be war-like as easily as gentle. It was also full of a marked carnal joy—as though the women were coupling with the air. There was something deeply foreign about the way these women moved, and this alone gave Avenahar an instinctive sense of the reality of what she saw: She couldn’t have invented what she had never before seen. Compared to these women, the women she’d known in the province moved in ways that were cramped, muted, restrained, ashamed.

  As she saw them more clearly, Avenahar began to believe these were foreign women, possibly from a hot place. Their clothing was odd. It didn’t cover them well; they were as
exposed as Syrian dancing girls, naked but for shell necklets, and skirts such as she had never seen—they fell only to the knees and were fashioned of dangling ropes. At the bottom of each cord was a knot weighted with fittings of gold; these caught the firelight, clicking together to create a rippling rhythm. Their rope skirts swung with authority, showing the women’s nether parts as they danced. Those skirts looked dangerous. All at once Avenahar understood that these women were not foreign at all—at least, not to this place. They were only foreign to this time. They had lived here, in this Holy Wood, not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of seasons ago.

  She counted them. Nine.

  She felt a veiled presence behind them, powerful, beneficent, watching like the moon. Avenahar felt it was somehow Ramis, but not Ramis; the source of her power, perhaps.

  The unknown presence seemed to put words directly into her mind: We are here, we have always been here. We weave in and out of the world.

  The fire vanished. Avenahar was aware once more of the cave, of extravagant warmth shedding from her body, of a sense of security, of stableness so encompassing she would not have feared being cast from a cliff onto sharp rocks. Ivalde had ceased her muffled whimpering, and Avenahar sensed her vision had somehow nourished Ivalde as well.

  When the elderwomen came to fetch them in the morning, Avenahar emerged from the cave feeling tender and raw as a newborn freshly pulled into a waiting world. All returned to the Middle Fire. The maids took their places before the elderwomen.