Her second prayer was for the Holy Nine, meeting in mystery now, within the sanctuary’s most hallowed inner enclosure.
“Lady of the Sun, let the seeresses name tonight any name but Sawitha’s. Cross her will. She lusts. Inspire her sisters to resist her. The people will never love her as they do Ramis. About Sawitha, many of us have dreamed savage, unholy dreams.”
THE BONFIRE HAD burned down to a troll’s-eye glow. The women of the Holy Nine were seated on ox hides ringed about it; each gripped her yew staff as they joined their minds in silence. The remains of the sow they had offered to Fria lay in a shallow pit by the fire. The women’s mantles were lined with wildcats’ fur; along the hem, they glimmered with blood-stone and amber. Their booted feet were stuffed with straw to keep out cold and moisture. Their hoods were pulled back to expose masses of unbound hair, all in hues of winter—ice gray, sleet-white, sun-on-snow—except for the burnished-copper hair of their youngest member, Blithgund.
Blithgund rose to cast the Nine Herbs onto the fire. Her rumpled masses of spiraling locks fanned down her back like a bedraggled cape. Her brow was apple-smooth. Her eyes showed the faint fixedness of fear.
She planned to speak Auriane’s case, even if Sawitha slew her for it.
Blithgund moved moonwise around the fire, chanting the Nine Herbs’ holy names. “Soul of wormwood, ghost of centaury . . .” A lyrical flourish of her hand sent a scented cloud into the fire. As she moved past the ox hide that marked Ramis’s empty place, she felt barren within. Ramis’s presence always caused her to feel the closeness of the vast, sunny mystery of Fria herself.
She’s made orphans of us. On this night we must hope all our spirits fused make one spirit as large as Ramis’s.
“Ghosts of goatweed and mullein . . .” Blithgund moved past Sawitha. A gust of wind dragged a strand of Sawitha’s dry, wispy hair across a face padded with flesh, still as a mask, blunt and square as a block—a face like a wall. Sawitha’s hair was the gray of a wolf’s coat—a closer look revealed it shot with varied shades of brown. Her eyes put Blithgund in mind of shining black beetles.
“Spirit of wolfsbane, soul of yarrow . . .”
Troubled clouds careened past the moon, hurrying off somewhere into the night. Blithgund wanted to go with them.
“Souls of water-mint, mother-herb, and moonwort . . . all be with us on this night . . .”
Blithgund then carried round the holy mead of the sanctuary—her charge, as youngest of them. It was strengthened with root of mandrake; tonight they would travel between nine realms and know the dead. As she offered Sawitha the horn, Blithgund read secret ecstasy in the face of this patient heir who had waited so long for Ramis’s staff.
She gave it next to Sawitha’s ally Sindgund, her formidable bulk settled comfortably on the ground. Sindgund’s lichen-colored hair was tangled as a bramble thicket; her eyes were deep-set, morose, searching. She’d been a sorceress serving a distant snow-country tribe before Sawitha had seen to her elevation to the Nine. Sindgund drank with a noisy slurp. Blithgund then gave the horn to each in turn, moving with grave steps as if to add the weight of a few more years, keenly aware that, because of her youth, her voice counted least among them.
Blithgund herself took the last draught. As she resumed her place, she felt none of the lush consolation always there when Ramis was present.
The night was without a heart.
Sawitha struck a bronze bell and they intoned rhyming words of a thousand-year-old spell that invoked Fria and all her unearthly attendants. Sindgund beat a skin drum in a rhythm that was sinuous, whiplike, and beautiful as a water snake swimming a river; each stress of that rocking rhythm hoisted them farther into the night sky. Harmonizing voices shivered with silver. Blithgund felt herself a falcon streaming down a pathway beneath overarching arbors. She melted into mountains, then found herself dancing round a Tree . . . the Ash that ran down the center of every heart, every village, and harbored all the nations of the Nine Worlds in its roots, trunk, and leafy crown.
Once she stole a look at Sawitha. The elder seeress put her in mind of a hawk, sharply alert, feathers tightly together, eyes shining and empty. Those polished-mirror eyes gave a bright but distorted picture of the world about, while deflecting gazes from the world within. With her draught-honed senses, Blithgund could see a hard beak, a neat, feathered breast, leathery claws squeezing the life from prey. Blithgund sometimes wondered if the ever-unfathomable Ramis had kept Sawitha close all those years as some sort of teaching for the rest of them, perhaps to show them how not to behave among the people, or maybe as a whetstone on which to sharpen their wits, so often were they forced to counter Sawitha’s subtle misapprehensions of everything Ramis said. Sawitha followed the proper order of the rites fixedly as the stars their courses, but for order’s sake alone; she had no curiosity about the terrors and joys of the mysteries beneath those rites.
Sawitha lifted her staff for silence, exposing an arm-ring of silver depicting an Ancestress crowned with yew berries. An owl’s call scudded into the attentive quiet.
There’s still a measure of hope, Blithgund thought. Sawitha cannot name herself. Ramis had too often insisted that the woman who took her staff should not want it, that her eagerness for the office would prove she did not understand it. I trust everyone has the good sense to confirm whoever Sawitha names. Then Sawitha’s ally Sindgund might never get a chance to propose Sawitha’s name.
Sawitha had a harpist’s voice, lush, rounded, possessed of the same emotionless calm as the owl’s call.
“She who performed the rites that kept us all living, is gone. She who told us the time to place the first cakes in the furrow, is taken away. She who led the Lady’s cart round the lake in spring, is among us no more. Ramis, highest of those who See, is stolen from us, and we must name another.” Sawitha examined each of them in turn, as a chieftain might make a final survey of the enemy’s lines. Then she said, “I propose that Algifu carry the staff.”
Blithgund thought it a jest, in the instant before she caught Sawitha’s purpose. None among them was less suitable. Algifu had little warrior-spirit in her. She was a woman who dreamed alone in quiet, a gentle creature unobtrusive as a straw cushion, whose glories were in the weavings of the mind.
The startled Algifu was like a shy maid dragged before multitudes. “Please, I do not want this.”
Sawitha’s head swiveled round like a prey-bird’s. She regarded Algifu with bright scorn, affecting to believe Algifu but a canny actor making a convincing show of modesty.
Blithgund knew her sisters were alert to Sawitha’s devices. But each in her separate fashion feared Sawitha just enough to clear from her path.
Sindgund was first to answer. “Algifu has never made treaties with our enemies. She has never led the great rites at Midsummer or at Eastre. She gives true oracles but a battle has never turned upon her advice. I say, no.”
One by one, they rejected Algifu. By Blithgund’s turn, Algifu was struggling to look serenely into the fire, clearly humiliated by all this.
Blithgund was known for an errant spiritedness that flared brightly just as others dampened their fires. Blithgund herself thought of it as the times that misery drove her to courage.
Blithgund looked at Sawitha, who did not meet her gaze. “Ramis told us, ‘A lust to stand above others is a trumpet in the ear that obscures the voices of the gods.’ That disqualifies some of us—but not Algifu, who does not even know how clever and kind she is, and who has never plotted against her sisters . . . or done anyone harm. Perhaps she is the best of us. I reject her only because her powers lie elsewhere.”
Blithgund felt Sawitha’s gaze easing toward her, full of malign excitement, alert to her presence in a way she had not been before. Sawitha was a predator waiting for the prey to run. She liked the chase.
Next to propose a name was Sindgund.
“I put forth one whose council is sought on the eve of battle. She has negotiated five treaties with Rome. She is
an adept who has mastered the skill of learning of future days by raising an Ancestress from the mound. This summer, she settled a dispute between our enemies the Hermundures that ended many years of raiding for salt along our river border.
“Most important, she is a woman who has never broken sacred law,” Sindgund continued. “Never has she lain abed with a man of the Roman enemy. Nor has she abandoned our lands. Her Mother-line is strong as Auriane’s. She has lived in Ramis’s shadow longer than any of us. I name Sawitha.”
Sawitha managed to look faintly disconcerted by all this praise.
“I will accept,” Sawitha said in that chill, beautiful voice, “if I am accepted by you.”
Sindgund responded, “Let it be.”
As the next woman in order of precedence repeated, “Let it be,” tension did not abate, for unanimity was required. Blithgund was certain she saw weary assent in several eyes, but Sawitha had prepared the ground well: To every one she’d built up obligations over time, through the granting of critical favors, or gifts to their families. When the gentle, much-loved Gerberga, the one woman Blithgund thought independent of Sawitha’s machinations, also said, “Let it be,” Blithgund felt a frantic sadness. Sawitha had made herself inevitable as spring flood.
Blithgund’s turn came.
“I say no to Sawitha.”
The flesh about Sawitha’s eyes contracted slightly; other than this, she showed no emotion. But Blithgund’s draught-sharpened senses could almost see red waves of rage rolling from her, the clenching hawk-feet.
Sindgund recovered herself first. “Blithgund, dear child. Why do you say no?”
Blithgund felt she stared straight through Sawitha’s beetle-black eyes, and into the night beyond.
“Ramis chooses from dreams, and her dreams are greater than ours. To name another while Auriane still lives seems monstrous to me.”
“But this is but the time between the raised blade and its falling on her neck,” Sindgund replied.
“Then we should be working spells for Auriane’s release instead of choosing another in her place.” Blithgund forged her way further into the sharp silence. “Ramis herself named Auriane for the sacred mould that lay on our high altar—and are not destiny and name the same? And no one’s spoken of Auriane’s slaying of the white aurochs. Yet we know this bull was a marker of fate because it was death-colored. This aurochs had bested so many Roman hunters . . . it’s a sign she’s stronger than her masters. And might still get free.”
At these last words, Blithgund saw Sawitha’s gaze flick toward the fire, alert as a huntress. Blithgund thought it puzzling, but had little leisure to wonder over it, for Sindgund spoke.
“The rash, untried Blithgund knows the great signs and portents better than all of us.”
“What’s befallen Auriane is the just punishment of the Fates, Blithgund,” Gerberga added in more placating tones. “She gave her flesh and spirit to a foreign murderer. She took their soul when she took their citizenship. Ramis chose Auriane as a babe, but a child can disappoint, in time’s fullness.”
“Do all of you mean to say, then, Ramis made a mistake?”
Several faces betrayed sharp discomfort. Sawitha continued to sit quietly, folded within herself.
Again, Sindgund recovered first. “Of course not. I don’t know Ramis’s reasons. I only speak from the needs of our present predicament. We cannot let the time of first planting come without our staff-carrier.” She added with soft savagery, “It’s a child’s stubbornness that leads you to speak so, against all of us.”
“And it’s a shameless lack of gratitude that lets you spurn one who risked her life to shelter us,” Blithgund said. She met each woman’s gaze in turn. “Auriane sent us arms so we wouldn’t starve. Now, they kill her for it. And all of you say, ‘Go and take her. It’s nothing to us. We’ll just find another!’”
This roused Sawitha to reply. That little-used smile had the sweetness of mouldering fruit. “But Blithgund, supplying those swords was another of her crimes.”
It was Blithgund’s turn to feel jolted from her path. Sawitha spoke truly. Auriane should have had nothing to do with the transport of weapons of iron; it was an act of sacrilege against the elder gods.
“Loyalty and foolishness are married in you, Blithgund,” Sindgund added. “But that is as it is. You are young.” Sindgund traced in air runic signs to promote concord. “We must not fight among ourselves; we hold the world together. Think on all that’s been said, and answer again, Blithgund. Do you confirm our choice, or not?”
The weight of her sisters’ gazes upon her chest made it difficult for Blithgund to get a breath. What right have I...? She sought refuge by looking into the calm, sunny center of their fire.
A log shifted; a mound of ash collapsed. And Blithgund saw something that before she had not—curving up from the low flames and living embers was the horn of a great aurochs, burnt black.
Why do we burn such a thing in our fire?
Blithgund poured the last of her strength into her reply. “I count it unholy to do this before Auriane is dead. I say ‘no’ to Sawitha.”
Sawitha watched her with the serenity of a sated dragon.
“I’ve every vote but Blithgund’s, it seems.” Sawitha’s voice conveyed only boredom. “The moon fades and dawn is near. Shall we propose another name? Or retire, purify ourselves, and meet again in three days’ time?”
One by one, they agreed they should retire and meet again.
Blithgund could not pull her gaze from the fire. Burnt bone. That is what Sawitha looked at, when I spoke of Auriane’s singular deed . . .
“Sawitha,” Blithgund said.
Sawitha faintly raised her brows.
“What burns in our fire?”
Sindgund and Sawitha exchanged a discreet glance.
“I performed a rite known to the adept, for which you have no understanding,” Sawitha said. “Ask me again in nine winters’ time.”
“That’s the horns of the aurochs Auriane slew. You somehow laid your hands on the remains. You’ve cursed Auriane. And turned the white bull’s power against her.”
“I’ll allow you to accuse me without warrant, just this one time—given your susceptibility to youthful passions,” Sawitha said. “But you will never do it again.”
As all rose to retire, Blithgund found herself trembling as though she’d carried the weight of a standing stone on her back. She hadn’t realized how frightened she’d been.
Day came, and passed into night.
At a time poised between midnight and dawn, a clot of evil clouds covered the moon.
Blithgund lay sleeping on her straw mat, in her bare hut within the sanctuary. She dreamed that a wyrm glided up from the deep forest. It flowed beneath the sanctuary gate, then wended its way into her hut.
She felt its rough, heavy body sliding across her belly, her chest, as the muscular creature made its way toward her throat. Its mouth was gaped open; long fangs were poised like twin daggers.
Even as she dreamed, Blithgund remembered Sawitha had the power to call up serpents that struck while her victim slept.
Dry snakeskin, scaled hands, clenching tightly . . . all at once she could get no air. The terror of the abyss filled her lungs. She was awakened by her own rasping gasps. A man’s strong hand was clamped about her neck, pinning her to the straw so she couldn’t cry out.
Fangs struck, full of poison . . . not fangs, but a knife; it missed her throat, slashing across her cheek. Hot blood flooded out as she furiously writhed.
The serpent was a man and he smelled of swamp rot. His heaving breaths were rank on her cheek. Mute starlight glanced off a short blade, raised again. She saw the glint of a maddened eye. Hel was in that eye, Hel put into a man, through Sawitha’s spell.
Blithgund thrashed with all her youthful strength; one flailing foot drove into a soft stomach. The iron hand’s grip loosened. Someone scuffled, fell backward, grunted a curse in the thick darkness. She tried to shout for he
lp but her voice was a mouse squeak. Then came the rapid beat of steps, fast fading, as a man sprinted for the sanctuary’s gate.
Blithgund got to her feet to give chase, but stumbled on her long sleeping-dress and was pitched onto her hands and knees. The miasma of the dream still lay heavily on her; the poison memory of a snake’s slick, cold body was bright and close as the low-hanging moon.
Sawitha. I thwarted her death-spell somehow—this time. But she’ll try again.
ON THE THIRD night, the Holy Nine convened again, even though the moon was waning now, and the time grown inauspicious.
An anguished Blithgund once again took her place round the fire, her voice quelled to a whisper from the near-throttling she’d been given.
On this night, Sawitha had had Ramis’s staff brought from its place of safekeeping on the altar of the inner sanctuary, and the weighty, smooth-worn stave of yew wood, nearly the height of a man, lay on the ground before her. When Ramis had been taken off to Rome, she’d charged Algifu with bringing the Veleda’s staff home to their lands. It was a dread thing, with its amber stones like yellow eyes, the world-parting runes carved down the shaft. In some way, it looked well there—Sawitha seemed a woman with the force of mind to carry it. She is clever, Blithgund thought; the effect was as though Sawitha sat upon a throne.
As the same ritual words were spoken, Blithgund bowed her head in a vain effort to conceal her face, torn and swollen from the slash of the knife. She knew, then, that there were ends to her courage.
She said “yes” to Sawitha.
Chapter 25
Dacia Three days before the Nones of December
On the day Marcus Julianus’s galley docked alongside Trajan’s winter camp in Dacia, frost tinted the stony ground bone gray and leached what little color there was from a skeletal landscape. He found a land scored by rough gorges that might have been cleaved by the axe of some maddened bacchante seeking to destroy this country, a place void of the dimmest glimmer of the light of Greek learning, a land ridden with angry spirits that matched his bleakness of soul. A place of no hope, as Auriane has none. A fitting stage on which to beg mercy for both of us, at the feet of the very man who tried to murder me in secret.
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