Wyth cowered from it. “No! It’s not true! My father—”
“Your father hanged himself for guilt, Wyth Arundel. He saw his own, black soul staring him in the face and took his life to be spared seeing it. Ask your mother, if you doubt me. She knows. That’s why she tried to have me dismissed from Halig-liath. She didn’t want you to get too close to me, to find out that your father was a murderer and a thief.”
Ah, his face! The horror, the shock, the sick comprehension, the despair of knowing that she—the survivor of Lagan—was right. And worst of all, that he loved her.
“Oh, dear God, Meredydd!” He fell heavily to his knees, his groan of anguish reverberating through the misty yard, bouncing back at them from the billows of fog. “Meredydd, I didn’t know! You must believe that.”
“I believe it,” she said and could not quite make out the outline of the well behind him where they lay—her mother and father. “But you are his son.”
“Yes! Yes! And my father’s stain is on me—in me. I know that. I know that! God forgive me!” he sobbed, and lay down at her feet.
Meredydd looked down at him lying there, groveling before her. She was supposed to laugh now, to savor her revenge like a forbidden sweet. But she was not savoring it, and she did not want to laugh. She wanted to pull Wyth Arundel into her arms and weep for him, weep with him, console him. She wanted to sing him a duan that would heal his wounds and lay the guilt he felt to rest. She wanted to scrub herself inside and out—expunging her own stain. Tears were hot on her cheeks.
“No, Wyth. No. This is wrong. Your father’s sins stained only his own hands. Yours are spotless. God need not forgive a sin you didn’t commit.”
He raised his head then, to look at her, and she reached out to him, straining forward against some invisible barrier. He faded away from her fingertips into the fog, his eyes craving her forgiveness.
o0o
Meredydd blinked and wiped tears from her face. She glanced up toward where she knew Skeet waited, but the mist was like sheep’s wool pressing her eyes; she could see nothing. Had he heard her, she wondered, snarling condemnation at the creature of her own aislinn? Or did the magic of this place prevent that, weaving silence around the Pilgrim’s Post? She hoped it did. She wanted no one to hear her sound so hateful.
It seemed darker to her now and she wondered how long she had been locked in the aislinn world, if world it was. Her stomach grumbled and she pressed her crossed arms over it. The Corah said there were other worlds—aislinn worlds, Eibhilin worlds. Worlds as real and distinct as the one men called Real, but they could be seen only in glimmers and glimpses, “as a memory of dreams,” the Corah said, and as “reflections on trembling waters.”
“Is not the creation of God infinite?” asked that Holy Book. “There are more worlds than this one. Meditate on this that you might discover the aim of God, the Spirit of this infinite Universe.”
The aim of God. And what was the aim of God where Meredydd-a-Lagan was concerned? What goal did That have in her life? What aim was she to have? She had thought arriving here was the aim once, and had concentrated on it single-mindedly, making herself miserable. But it was not the arrival on the Meri’s shore that was significant, it was the condition of the Pilgrim’s soul when she arrived upon the shore.
Meredydd sat up a little taller and concentrated her entire attention on the matter of aim. She had thought Pilgrimage a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and keeping her eyes open for tests. That had been wrong. This was a spiritual path, no matter how practical the feet that trod it. The goal was a spiritual one as well, and it was not merely the Meri’s acceptance.
To be like Master Bevol. Those were the right words, but did she really understand what they meant?
No, she thought now, riding a growing wave of realization, it was not the Meri’s acceptance that was the aim, but becoming something the Meri could accept! It was not seeing the Meri that was the goal, but becoming someone who could see Her. A Jewel of great virtue—of great value.
A shout of pure joy bubbled up from her throat and rolled like a bright golden ball across the nearly invisible water. She was ready and willing to follow it, but her body constrained her merely to jump to her feet and dance, like a madwoman, over the sand. She was stiff, but ignored the complaints of her joints.
She laughed and sang and whirled until she was gasping and giddy. Even then, she did not stop, but stumbled about until her addled feet met the waves. Surprised, shocked by the sudden intense cold, she pitched to her hands and knees, sobered forcefully by a splash of frigid water in her face.
“Meredydd! Meredydd! Mistress!” Skeet’s cries provided yet another dash of reason and she clambered shakily to her feet.
“Here, Skeet! Here!” She backed out of the water, her tunic and cloak clinging wetly to her body. The euphoria was passing and her returning senses told her she was soaked through and cold and hungry and thirsty. She heard the scrunch of feet in sand and moved toward the sound. Skeet appeared out of the
fog.
“Meredydd! I heard you cry out. Are you hurt?”
“No, no. I’m fine. I just—” She found herself unable to explain what had prompted her to behave so daftly and fell silent.
“Ah, but you’re not fine. Not at all. You’re all wet and your teeth are clackiting. Come to the fire—you can have some tea. I’ve made sassafras.”
“No, Skeet. I have to go back to my post.” She tried to pull away, but her held her in a surprisingly strong grip.
“Not ’til you’ve changed your tunic. And you can wear my jacket until your cloak dries. Come.” He tried to lead her up the beach.
She resisted. “I have to go back, Skeet. She could come at any time.”
He gave her a concerned look, softened by the mist winnowing between them, then sighed exaggeratedly. “Oh, g’on then. If you won’t come to my fire, my fire shall have to come to you.”
He was as good as his word. Within minutes of her return to her Pilgrim’s Post, he had a fire laid and blazing just below and to the left of her seat in the little dune.
“Now,” he said, when he was sure the flames had taken hold, “Here is a fresh tunic and stockings and my jacket. Your leggings will fire dry, I reckon. I’ll go away a bit while you change, but you’d better call when you’re done or you’ll get no dinner.”
“Dinner?” she asked. “What time can it be?”
He glanced up into the dense wool. “I make it afternoon, by the shadows. I drove a stick into the ground up yonder.” He jerked his chin back up toward his base camp. “Now, you get changed. I’ll go back and get the victuals.”
Meredydd nodded, but he was already gone. She marked his footfalls until they were eaten up by the fog, then she pulled off her wet things and got herself into the dry.
Dinner! she marveled, as she consumed that meal, sitting by her fire. Could she really have been so wrapped in her visions that time had become pleated into such a narrow fabric? Had she really stepped into a world where Skeet could neither see her nor hear her voice?
She asked him when he come back with more hot, strong tea, “Did you hear me, Skeet? While I was...” She wasn’t sure what to call it—dreaming? She gestured at her little dune.
“I heard you shout,” he said cautiously. His hands clutched his tea cup, white-knuckled. “Just before you went into the water.”
“But before that—did you hear anything?”
“I heard you sing a duan...I thought. But that was earlier on.”
His eyes were intent upon her face, but he did not ask what had happened to her—what she had seen, heard, felt. She thought Osraed Bevol must have instructed him as to how a Pilgrim’s Weard was to behave, so she said nothing except, “I saw several aislinn wonders, Skeet. But I haven’t seen the Meri.”
He merely nodded, then returned up-beach to his own fire. Meredydd took up her watch once again, perched in her tussock chair. Afternoon wore on, evening came and passed, night droppe
d over the shore like a dark veil. The fog stayed, wrapped protectively over the dunes and their two inhabitants. Meredydd’s fire died down and Skeet built it up again, tending it only briefly. He kept it burning all the night while she sat and stared, her eyes wandering the shifting tunnel to the sea. The waves could barely be seen as tiny, wriggling serpents of phosphor crawling endlessly up onto the sand. Their rhythm was lulling, hypnotic and Meredydd rocked to it, humming duans and lays well into the night.
o0o
He cried without knowing why he cried. One moment he was sitting in the garden, meditating on its beauty, and the next he was overcome by a wave of anguish so complete it all but knocked him over.
He clambered to his feet in a wallow of sudden self-loathing and staggered toward the house. He must lock himself in his room. He must let no one see him like this.
But it was too late for that. A movement above him made him glance up to the balcony that overlooked the garden. It was his mother. He saw her face for only an instant as she turned and went into her rooms, and what he read there only made his anguish worse. She believed him bewitched and, he had to allow, he sometimes half-believed it himself.
He prayed desperately that the time until his Pilgrimage would pass more quickly, that he would be freed of these agonizing twists of heart and soul. But, for now, the tears continued to fall, driving him to the sanctuary of his chambers, where he lay down and tried to sleep.
His dreams were busy but anonymous and he woke, hours later, in the failing light of day, feeling as if a burden had been lifted. He was ravenously hungry and he felt oddly light and giddy. Still, there was, in the back of his mind, the conviction that Meredydd was trying to tell him something. Something very important. But he couldn’t grasp it and so traveled lightly downstairs to see if supper was anywhere near ready. He smelled the answer to that as he reached the top of the stairs. Ah, now that was wonderful! He smiled to himself and began to sing.
Perhaps his mother was right. Perhaps he was bewitched. But at moments like these, that didn’t seem such a terrible thing at all.
o0o
Morning came and the fog lifted to hang over the cliffs, creating a strange, narrow world where the sky seemed reachable by fingertips. Through occasional crevasses in the top of the world, the higher clouds shone like a polished pewter bowl and raindrops spattered here and there like errant tears. Meredydd, who loved the rain, enjoyed it at first, but after hours of ceaseless watching, even she began to feel a sympathy with that which cried.
She ate a small breakfast of bread and fish and berries, then stretched her legs and stood and breathed deeply of the tangy air and wondered if today the Meri would come.
She did not.
Meredydd passed the day trying not to fall asleep. She moved only to relieve cramps in her limbs and the promptings of her body and then returned to her place. She got out her book of meditations and recited prayers; she sang contemplative duans; she tried to meditate, but found herself counting larger pebbles among the tiny grains of sand within sight. She made up stories about twists of driftwood and the ruin of the old fisherman’s hovel she could just see from where she sat. Her mind was restless, then lethargic. Impatient, then content. It never soared to that exalted state she desired so much; she settled for mere tranquility.
All the while, she tried to remain optimistic, reminding herself that she was still within the frame of the historically set time period. While the shortest watch had been only ten hours, the longest was three days. Beyond that temporal boundary, the Meri had not been seen. She still had time, she told herself. The Meri could come tonight.
But she did not.
And Meredydd, growing weary and anxious, began to lose the spark of hope she’d worked so hard to nurture. No aislinn worlds opened to her. No bright revelations crowded her brain. She went back over the ones she’d had (or thought she’d had) while sitting on her tuft of sand and grass. They opened no new doors and, though she thought long and fondly of her childhood and of her mother and father, she remained stranded in the present, alone.
She found sympathy in her for Prentice Wyth—no, more than sympathy—empathy. He had lost his father, too, no less horribly than she had. And he was innocent of his father’s stain of greed. There was no avarice in Wyth Arundel, whatever other faults he might possess.
She contemplated the aim of God as an academic might—with warm, expectant detachment—and held up her own goal and studied it. She imagined it as a jewel—a crystal, not unlike the one she had received at the Farewelling. It floated in the dark before her eyes, a gem of pale gold—a topaz—multi-faceted, gleaming. It was flawed, of course, and must be so, because she was flawed. She turned it over and over, searching for the imperfections.
In the end they went uncounted and she set the crystal aside, bored with her own blemishes. She began to relive her Pilgrim’s journey, beginning before she even stepped out the door of Gled Manor. She followed herself through morning ablutions, prayers and meditations. Were her prayers sincere enough? Were her meditations pure enough? How could she know?
She was swept into the aislinn state of being without even sensing the transition. Gone from the beach where her body sat, unmoving, she set foot on the road to the Nairne Crossing and began her Pilgrimage again.
She experienced the same combination of uncertainty and contentment at Mam Lufu’s, the same futile wonder at the Pool of the Gwenwyvar, the same trapped terror in the village of Blaec-del; she pined for the absent Bevol and Gwynet and for the missing amulet, knew a deep affection for the family of Galchobar Mill and could not help but feel that her decision to help the child was the right one. She knew it was the only one she could have made.
She resisted the temptation to exult in that; instead, she moved on and found herself on a beach just being touched by the first dusting of twilight.... Or was it dawn that seeped beneath the blanket of overhanging cloud, staining the world with rose amber? Meredydd was caught, for a breathing, between worlds existing neither here nor there, but somewhere in between.
Then Skeet was there with breakfast. It was dawn.
The scent and feel of the air pulled her back into the waking world. It was pungent, heavy, sweet and filled with a trembling static.
“Storm coming,” she said. “Soon.” No sooner were the words out of her mouth than a gust of moisture-laden wind rushed by, tickling.
Skeet glanced up and around, then handed Meredydd her food and scurried off to batten down his camp. She felt him coming and going as she sat in the darkening morning, scenting the breeze and listening to the wind and waves. She went back over her journey yet again, step by step, entering the aislinn world at will. The beach ceased to be real.
There was a composure about her contemplation now that had not been there before. The frantic search for a sense of her worth was at an end. She merely accepted that, acting out of her natural inclination, Meredydd had done this, felt that, decided one thing, chosen another. What she had become in the loving hands of her parents, under the fond companionship and careful tutelage of Osraed Bevol, was already determined. It was already written indelibly on her soul. It piloted her life, her thoughts, her feelings, her action and inaction, her decisions.
That was not something she could alter at the last moment, and that was what the Meri would accept or reject.
Now, Meredydd did not fret over the kind of jewel she could not become while sitting on a beach many miles from home. Now, Meredydd merely waited.
Chapter 13
The Meri is not reachable by the weak, or by the careless, or by the ascetic, but only by the wise who strive to lead their soul into the dwelling of the Spirit.
Rivers flow to the Sea and there find their end and their peace. When they find this peace and this end, their name and form disappear and they become as the Sea.
Even so, the wise who are led to the Meri are freed of name and form and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit who is greater than all greatness.
&nbs
p; — The Book of the Meri, Chapter II, Verses 5-7
The storm was heralded by a slash of lightning that rent the sky nearly in two. Its thunder followed close behind, shattering the relative quiet of the beach. The breeze turned into a wind that blew brazenly across the water, whipping waves to frenzy.
Dark clouds scudded like circling predators, drawing closer and closer to their defenseless quarry. Then, the rain came; huge, hard drops that seemed to be made of material much sharper and stouter than water cascaded from the hemming sky, beating down upon the beach and its occupants.
Meredydd sat, keeping herself determinedly upright against the growing force of the wind. She had to clutch the cloak Skeet had returned to her, dry, to keep it from blowing about. It was dry no longer. Her braid came unbound in a matter of minutes under the gale’s unloving touch and her hair flailed about her head in tangled banners.
Skeet scrambled to her side and flopped down beside her on the rough sand.
“You must move, mistress! The water is rising!” he shouted and pointed a finger at the encroaching waves.
Meredydd shook her head. “No,” she mouthed.
“Please, mistress. I’ve dug a burrow just behind you. You’ll be safer there—warmer.”
“No.”
He stared at her for a moment in consternation, then withdrew. But the gale worsened, lashing the shore with waves higher than Meredydd could reach. They crashed upon the sands, rolling threateningly to the foot of her sandy dais and showering her with spray. Skeet reappeared to shout in her ear.
“Now will you leave?”
She shook her head.
“Meredydd, please! This is not a good time for your stubbornness!”
“No!” she shouted back.
Again, he withdrew. He returned when the wind began to blow sand and spray horizontally up the beach, bombarding Meredydd with stinging, salty, sodden grit. He had to wade through ankle deep water to reach her. He shouted her name.
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