His non-eyes blinked and the hair was burnished chestnut and the eyes were a clear brown and he understood, in that moment, that he was witness to a timeless sacrilege. The Wicke, smug smile on her pretty face, waited to attain the unattainable. It was the Meri she had waited for then; it was the Meri she would wait for only days from now. Did she know what her sacrifice would bring upon Caraid-land?
He stared full into those dreadful eyes—silver again—and imagined that they could see him, though there was nothing of him to see. She must know, the young Wicke, for those eyes laughed wickedly and those lips parted in a smile.
The shriek that woke him was his own, and he sat straight up in his big, warm bed, suddenly chilled to the marrow. Sea-cold sweat stood out all over his body and he clutched at himself trying to rub the terror away.
“Ealad?” His wife’s voice came to him, gentle and warming, and her hand lighted upon his damp back. “Whatever is wrong, dear man? Have you had a dream?”
“I have had a nightmare,” he whispered and reached a hand out to feel the solid flesh of her good, strong arms. “Ah, Bevol,” he breathed, “you don’t know what you are doing.”
Chapter 7
The Spirit of the Universe is seen in a pure soul as in a bright and shining mirror.
It is seen in the world of Heaven as clear as light.
But in this Land of Shades, It is seen only as a memory of dreams, as a reflection in trembling waters.
— The Corah
Book I, Verses 25-27
She slept in a bed that night—or at least it passed for one. The mattress was of fresh straw covered with a thick woolen blanket. A wooden box-frame held the straw staunchly in place.
It did not hold Meredydd’s dreams. Those were already outside in morning sunlight that had yet to arrive, listening to the words of her Master, Bevol.
“I am too old,” he said. “Too tired. I cannot continue. You must take Pov-Skeet and go on without me.”
She must have protested. She knew she must. Protested that Skeet instead of Osraed Bevol would stand as her Weard, oversee her quest for the Meri’s Kiss. She must have quaked with fear and uncertainty at that, for she had not been without Osraed Bevol since he lifted her out of the mud seven years before. He had become both her mother and her father, friend and counselor, teacher and mentor.
But she heard herself say nothing—the crush of emotions remained bottled in that strange, dream-ether that dimmed senses or heightened them at a whim. She listened—the Osraed was speaking again: “I have a riddle for you,” he said. “A riddle.”
She waited, poised, tense.
“I have a riddle,” he said again...and again, then faded into her dream. She saw his lips move, but could no longer hear what he was saying. She stared at those lips. “A riddle,” they said.
She woke suddenly, tumbled out of her bed of straw and dressed herself, hurrying. She had to force herself to perform her morning meditations, then, unable to concentrate, recited the Table of Medicinals and Herbs to calm herself and gain composure.
With some semblance of that, she tried the meditation again with more success. Still, as she descended the crooked stairs to the ground floor of the wayhouse, she was already filling with dread, already cringing in anticipation at what Bevol would say to her this morning.
She pulled the Wisdom amulet out of the collar of her shirt and stared at it. It looked no different from yesterday, except for perhaps being a bit more shiny from prolonged contact with her skin. But she needed wisdom and wondered how the amulet could help her focus what little she had...if, indeed, she had any. She remembered how Bevol had taught her to focus her energies through a poultice of herbs while performing a Healweave. Perhaps this worked in a similar way. Or perhaps it was more like a rune crystal and you had to sing it a duan and focus the inyx in it instead of through it.
It was odd, she thought, how everyone thought of Osraed-hood as having to do entirely with Runeweaving and amulets and magic potions (especially new Prentices) but here she was, two days into her Pilgrimage, knocking upon the very gatepost of Osraed-hood, and she knew less about that than she did Dream Tell and Medicinals and the many ways of determining what another was thinking by bodyspeak and eyetell. Bevol had concentrated her education on prayer and meditation and growing and selecting herbs that healed. He emphasized the power inherent in honesty, fidelity, charity and wisdom and spent little time discussing the totems and tokens of his station, myriad though they were. She had used crystals, of course, but this—
She had been worrying the little midge of silver in searching fingers. Now the worry became a caress. A totem. A rune. A thing. Wisdom lay in how one used a thing. She tucked the amulet into her shirt and went down to the dining room.
The house-keep’s wife was there, working behind the long table where food and drink were served. A little girl played on the floor at one end of the table, galloping a small, carved wooden horse along the rutted wood-grain trails. Meredydd smiled at them.
“Daeges-eage, Moireach. Is the Osraed Bevol out?”
“Not as yet, mistress.” She smiled shyly in return and wiped her hands on her apron. “I’m layin’ on breakfast now, though.”
She studied Meredydd for a moment, then asked, “You his daughter?”
“No. Well, that is, he’s raised me as a daughter. My parents are dead. I’m his Prentice.”
The woman’s eyes grew round as coins. “But ye’re cailin! Oh, beg pardon, I meant—well, I didn’t think—”
“Neither did I,” said Meredydd, “but Osraed Bevol brought me up and taught me and took me to Halig-liath to study. I’m very grateful to him.”
The woman’s smile was back. “Oh, and so’m I. Grateful y’all come here.” She glanced at her daughter fondly. “Yer Osraed Bevol’s a saint, Prentice. I thought we’d be buryin’ our little Ambre ’fore the week was out, but now—well, ye can see.”
Aware of the scrutiny from above, the little girl suspended play and favored Meredydd with a gap-toothed grin.
“What was wrong with her?”
“She fell two day back. Off the fence ’round goat y’rd. Hit her head and went into this awful sleep. My husband was sure it was some Runeweave that old Wicke-woman threw—a magical sleep-like. But Diarmaid, tha’s my husband, he’d not go to Mam Lufu t’ask, for he figured she’s the cause of it all. But your Master, he looked down into Ambre’s eyes and listened t’her heart and says it’s just the ’fects of falling and hittin’ ’er head. Con-somethin’. An’ he had us leave the room an’ he sat with her. I could hear him prayin’ and talkin’ to the Meri an singin’ duans. And when he come out she was just sleepin’. Quiet-like, natural-like. Not...charmed, y’know.”
Meredydd marveled, wondering if she’d ever know how to do something that miraculous. She had healed wounds, diagnosed ailments and treated them under Bevol’s careful supervision. She knew the correct herbs to administer for the colic, the croup and the mild pox. She’d drawn aches out of bodies and heads, but never done so much as restoring a comatose child to consciousness. She found herself fingering the small lump beneath the fabric of her shirt and tunic.
“There was one other, wasn’t there?” asked the woman.
“Pardon?” said Meredydd.
“Girl Prentice. I’ve heerd tales from Grampus, I think. Oh, it’d be ages back, then. Wrought terrible things, Grampus said.”
Meredydd’s throat tightened and her heart hung, cold and still, in her chest. “What terrible things?” she asked, without really wanting to know.
“They say the sea boiled,” said the house-keep’s wife, giving complete conviction to something she’d struggled to recall only moments before. “And the winds blew havoc o’er the land and dead fish and men floated ashore. And no new Osraed came out of Halig-liath for many a year. Osraed said it were proof the Meri’d changed.”
“Changed?”
“Well, She must have done. To stir up such grief. Something must have angered Her powerful to pu
t Her off being so loving and gentle. They say She changed.” She nodded, certain that “they” must be right. “It happens from time to time,” she added. “But then, you’d know that, bein’ Prentice.”
“Yes,” said Meredydd automatically, “once every century, my Master says.”
And was it a coincidence that Taminy-a-Cuinn had gone on Pilgrimage the year the Meri had last changed? Osraed Ealad-hach didn’t think so, of that she was sure. Was he right? Had the Meri’s anger been directed at the sheer heresy of a female Pilgrim? Had Taminy walked into the sea or had she been dragged?
A chill of cold deeper than any she had ever known sliced through Meredydd’s soul. She pressed her hand flat against the amulet and excused herself, seeking the warmth of the summer morning. She smothered the suspicion in prayers, immersed the fear in contemplation.
She was still sitting under the wayhouse’s battered wooden awning, her worn prayer book in her hand, when Skeet came out in search of her.
“Maister’s out, Mistress Meredydd,” he told her, his dark eyes glittering. He seemed always on the edge of smiling, and she always on the verge of asking why. This morning she did.
“Skeet, you have smiled knowingly and secretly and mysteriously since I’ve known you. Why are you smiling?”
“Why, ’cause I’m knowing and secret and mysterious.”
“And what do you know?”
“That I know naught.”
“And what’s your secret?”
“Something only I know.”
“And what’s your mystery?”
“That I know a secret and yet know naught.”
“Meaning, you have no secret.”
“Or meaning I’ve a secret, but I’ve not the wisdom to understand what it is.” He held open the thick wooden door of the house and ushered Meredydd inside.
“You’re posing me,” she accused him.
“Everyone has a secret and every secret poses a riddle.”
It was Osraed Bevol’s riddle that Meredydd wanted to hear, but he made her wait through breakfast, uttering no word of her Pilgrimage until he had sat back with his tea and closed his eyes.
“I am tired,” he said. “Too tired to continue on this journey with you.”
She said nothing.
“You must take Pov as your Weard and continue without me.”
Still, she said nothing.
“You must next find...” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “What must you find, Prentice Meredydd?”
“The Gwenwyvar.” She said the name, only just realizing that she knew it and that it was connected somehow with the place she had dreamed of and forgotten.
“The Gwenwyvar,” said Bevol nodding. “The White Wave. She is a being as pure as air...as pure as thought. She will guide you. Now, how will you find her?”
“You have a riddle for me. I dreamed last night that you had a riddle for me, but... I’m ashamed, Master. I’ve forgotten what it was.” She felt the clammy hand of failure lay itself over hers again.
“How could you forget, anwyl, what you never knew?” asked Bevol, eyes failing to mask his amusement. “Listen to me. Near the village is that which runs, but which neither rests nor sleeps. Find it. It will take you to a place where there are many white houses, each with a single pillar, and where children dance while their mother dances not. There, maidens rise from water without wetting their white gowns. In this place you will find the Gwenwyvar.”
“When will I see you again, Master?”
“When you have completed your Pilgrimage and come home to me.”
“Then I will come home?”
“You will always come home, anwyl. Everyone comes home eventually. And when you do, I will be waiting for you. Now, when you are ready, go. Pack food enough for several days—you see to that, Pov.”
The boy nodded, already rising from his chair. Bevol turned his attention back to Meredydd.
“Listen to me carefully, Meredydd. The goal is the purpose of Pilgrimage. Let nothing distract you from your goal.”
She pondered that exhortation as she and Skeet headed out of the village later that morning. She had not cried at their leave-taking, much as she wanted to. She comforted herself that Bevol would be waiting for her at home and that Skeet was beside her on the trail as their Master’s surrogate. She was not, then, without family on her journey.
As they passed by the sloping meadow just beyond the village’s sparse jumble of buildings, Meredydd wondered what Mam Lufu would do if she went to her for help. She combed the stand of alder and fir with her eyes, but the big/little cave/hut was completely obscured. She wondered whimsically if it moved about the countryside, appearing here and there, wherever people needed healing or comforting or had crops to be blessed.
She drew the amulet out of her shirt neck and held it in the palm of her hand. Wisdom. Wisdom for the riddle. She looked high and low. Followed every flash of movement with her eyes, seeking something that ran, but neither rested nor slept. She saw nothing that merited that description, no bird, no animal.
A sound tugged at the fringes of sensation, tumbling, gurgling, trilling atonally. It was the Bebhinn, of course, the Melodious Lady, singing her way wildly toward the Western Sea.
Meredydd stopped stone still in the middle of the path. That was it! That which ran and neither rested nor slept.
She ran, herself, following the liquid duan, vaguely aware of Skeet behind her, his feet near silent on the pine needle carpet of the trail. She rounded a huge rock, ducked beneath a pine bough and stopped.
Skeet nearly collided with her from behind.
“The Bebhinn-tyne!” she said and laughed, glancing at her younger companion. “That which runs—”
“But ne’er rests nor sleeps,” he finished, and nodded. “Aye, and babbles ceaselessly, as well.” His eyes sought her face.
“And now?”
“Now we follow it downstream, toward the Sea.” And look for a village with many houses on white pillars in which a mother, who does not dance, watches her children, who dance. It would have to be a village, she supposed. But no, that was too obvious, wasn’t it? The houses wouldn’t really be houses, they’d be something else. Something that you might find along a river.
She took a deep breath of the river air and started along the bank, feeling much better with one piece of the puzzle safely tucked away. She began thinking of the maidens rising from the water and chuckled at herself. Here, she’d been half-visualizing a little village full of white houses and empty bath tubs full of maidens in white dresses. If the place was along a river, the maidens’ water would most likely be a pool.
The Sun was high in the sky when the Bebhinn’s narrow stream dropped suddenly downward several feet, disappearing over a crown of mossy rocks. Meredydd hurried forward along the gently sloping bank, feet slipping in the grass and detritus from over-hanging trees.
She reached the descent and uttered an exclamation of triumph. Below was a small pool not much bigger than the main room of Mam Lufu’s hovel. At its nether end, the water continued on its way, laughingly escaping the blunt teeth of scattered rocks. She and Skeet slid down the shallow embankment onto the moist sandy shore of the pool. Then she paused to look around her, frowning, her exhilaration cooling to anxious uncertainty.
“I see no houses,” said Skeet, echoing the movement of her head.
Meredydd lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the mid-day Sun and scanned the trees. “They won’t be houses, really, Skeet. Not people’s houses, anyway. They might be bird’s houses or-or bees, or...anything.”
Her eyes sought weaver nests. Those could be described as houses with a single pillar—if you granted the pillar could be upside-down. But wait, weren’t trees houses? Wasn’t the trunk a pillar? But these trees weren’t white. They were dark-skinned oak and pine. Meredydd chewed her lip. And where was the still mother with her dancing children? Nothing in this place was moving at all.
“This be the place, Meredydd?” asked Skeet fr
om behind her.
“No, Skeet. I don’t think it is.”
He nodded. “But it looks a fine place for dinner. Shall we stop and eat?”
She wanted desperately to go on—to walk until she either found the Place of the Gwenwyvar, or dropped from exhaustion.
But there was Skeet to consider. She agreed, reluctantly, and they dropped, cross-legged, where they stood and dug into their packs.
Half an hour later, they refilled their water bags and went on, ever following that which ran and sang and neither slept nor ceased babbling.
Meredydd’s mind traveled also, back the way they had come to the village where they had left Osraed Bevol. She wondered, now, if the village had ever existed at all, or if it had been some masterful Runeweave on her Master’s part—a place which appeared only when Pilgrims passed through, which existed only for their edification. And Mam Lufu—had she been real? Had she really known Taminy-a-Cuinn—a character Meredydd knew not whether to accept as heroine or heretic, martyr or monster, victim or justly punished errant?
It was suddenly critically important that she resolve this dilemma, for it created another, larger one. If Taminy-a-Cuinn had been a heretic or worse for daring to seek a station traditionally accorded only to men, if she had died horribly as a result of that heresy and brought retribution on all of Caraid-land, why then—why—was Osraed Bevol leading Meredydd-a-Lagan into the same sacrilege?
Her feet stumbled on the path, making Skeet glance over at her in momentary concern. She didn’t look at him, but only shook her head, trying to distract her thoughts from the direction they were taking. Shame tumbled through her that she could even have wondered, however briefly, about the purpose of her goal. Bevol loved her, that was the only assurance she need have. And these thoughts—she wanted them gone, purged, cleansed from her heart, her mind.
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