The Oak above the Kings

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  "Your hand is still full of stars," she said, "as it was when first I read it. Deeper, finer, higher—it is all still there." She turned my hand this way and that, bending it backward to make the lines leap out plain, then nearly folding it closed. "But there is more in it now—"

  "What things?" I asked humbly, after she had been silent what seemed a long time.

  "I do not entirely understand, but—there is a question you have not asked, a question of long standing, and you must ask it of one who is hidden? The secret valley? Is there such a place? Well, your hand tells me you must go there, and you must ask about your mother; time it is for you to know at last. Your mother wishes it so."

  I gasped, for of all things I had been expecting I never thought her to say aught like this.

  "My mother is dead, Jamadarin," I said after a while. "She died when I was barely two years old."

  The golden eyes were soft as summer, the smile full of love. "Well, surely she is! How else would she be telling me this, how putting it into her son's hand for me to find? Because she is no more in the body this life round does not mean she no longer cares for her dear ones, or has abandoned looking after them—but I do not have to tell you this."

  "Nay," I said, after another long pause, for I did not trust my voice. "Nay, you do not. What more?"

  She stared into my hand for many moments. "Someone else," she said at last. "But he sleeps and dreams—I cannot reach him, he cannot speak to me. Your mother knows him—Go to the secret valley. That is all I can say. You will be glad of it."

  She returned my hand to my keeping, and we sat on for a while in companionable silence. But my mind was reeling.

  My mother! Speaking to Majanah? It seemed impossible, but I knew that my friend had read my hand aright. I would go to Glenshee, then, and I would ask that question I had been given leave, so long ago now, to ask. I would ask Seli, Queen of the Shining Folk, about my mother, and I would hear what she had to tell me. Time it was that I should know.

  But summer had passed its height, warm and green and slow, the trees heavy with full leaf yet just beginning to be touched by autumn's oncoming, by the time I made ready for my journey to the valley of Glenshee.

  Majanah had gone home to Aojun at Midsummer, leaving Donah here with us as she had promised; and a fine time we were all having of it. The one twingeing note in that summer's tune was that Donah and Malgan were often in each other's company. But—so far, at least—it seemed they dealt with one another as brother and younger sister, Malgan protective and instructive, Donah admiring and teasing and altogether adoring. As for the other couple on whom all eyes were fixed: Well, so far, again, there was no sign of the prophesied heir Majanah had foretold; but from all appearances, Arthur and Gweniver would not be delaying the starting of one very much longer.

  It was partly for that very reason that I delayed my going: I wished to see them happy and settled before I went, though I knew perfectly well that after all their years of marriage they were familiar enough to and with each other not to need my henwife's fussing. Yet by another kind of reckoning they were but new in love; all Keltia, indeed, could see they were besotted, and the folk were as delirious with the joy of it as were the lovers themselves. We had all waited long enough for it to come.

  But both of them urged me to go, in no uncertain terms; Morgan, too, insisted, though it was Arthur who was most persuasive.

  "The Queen Seli gave you leave to ask," he reminded me more times than I could count, "and you delayed the query,—and for that she gave you the praise. But I too think the time is come for you to know—and too," he added, faltering a little, "there is that other thing she spoke of."

  He could not say the name any more than could I: But I can write it down—Merlynn. He was the sleeper and dreamer Majanah had seen in my hand's palimpsest; would he be, too at Glenshee?

  Gweniver had followed my thought, and spoke gently "The only way to know is to go."

  And so I did.

  In the interests of speed I went by aircar to Methven, the market town that lies on the edge of the great plain of the Litherlands, east of the HollowMountains, and which was the nearest settlement of size to Glenshee. Not that any of the townsfolk knew of the existence of the hidden vale; but I thought it best to continue on the side of caution, and did not speak of my errand nor yet my destination.

  Arthur had given orders, and two horses were ready waiting, a well-gaited mount and a packbeast; the stabler was incurious, seemed not to twig my assumed name, and I daresay had forgotten all about me by the time I had ridden out of the townland.

  All the same, I took a circuitous route through the dales and fells, until I had satisfied myself, with a few Druid tricks here and there, that I was free from possible trackers. Only then did I allow myself to relax and revel in the passing loveliness: blue hills heavily forested, steep streams clattering from the heights of MountKeltia away in the south. Here so far north autumn was already moving upon the land, and the weather was cool and bright and windy—as those say who live on Tara, the Hawk was out, the northeast wind that is the precursor to An-Lasca.

  I was ridiculously, causelessly happy; I sang as I rode, and recited great chunks of classic chaunts to my horses. But mostly I thought of how things had worked themselves: of Majanah, and Donah, and Artos and Gwennach, and even Marguessan… A corner had turned, and here alone in the boundless North I could feel the changes as I had not been able to sense them back in Caerdroia.

  Keltia had become itself again, in far shorter a time than we might have thought, back when first we started to try to make it so. Those great reforms and restorals that Gweniver had begun and Arthur had expanded were more firmly in place each day, each hour. High doings, to be sure: Perhaps not since the days of the great Astrogator had all the ideals of the Keltia he had intended been so clearly and so patently in force.

  To me, though, an even greater thing than this was the way the folk had blossomed in the presence of those restorings. In my days as journeyman bard—well, spy, if you insist—when I had wandered round Gwynedd for Arthur and the Companions, I had seen the despair of my people as few others who worked for the Counterinsurgency had ever seen it. They merely observed it: I was out in it, lived with it, and with them, those sufferers under Edeyrn's heel. I endured it with them, bled for them as they endured it, quietly encouraged them as they struggled to change it and resist it. And so quietly had that work been done that they never noticed at all, maybe, that it had been words that had given them heart to fight back—a song or chaunt or poem sung them by a travelling bard, lodged in their souls to give them strength when they came to call upon it.

  And it was right that they should not remember where the strength had come from: I was glad it should be so, gladder still that I had lived to see this. It was what we had all worked for, given our lives and hearts and minds to, given our souls to, whether we lived or died in the giving. Now it was here, and Arthur and Gweniver the ones of whom it had sprung; and soon now, very soon, that life would go on in a life that would be both Arthur's and Gweniver's joined at last, and Keltia would have found its way back to itself.

  So I thought as I rode.

  You will remember I had been this way but once before, and that guided by Gwyn himself. I could well have been lost entirely in that trackless wild; but somehow I knew that I was called, was but following a path laid out for me, which would bring me safe to my journey's end.

  So when I rode at last over the lip of the valley in which Sychan lay, I was not at all surprised to see waiting for me a figure cloaked in gray, seated still as stone upon a stallion as gray and still as that stone itself. "Well met, Birogue of the Mountain," I said, in the bard's voice that can carry like a far bell across a crowded room though unraised and unstressed in the speaking.

  "Three times met, and this not yet our last," she answered, and I could tell from her tone that she was smiling, though I could not see her face in the shadow of her gray hood. She turned her horse and fell in be
side me as we rode down to the DryRiver.

  "So, then?" she said as we dismounted to lead the beasts to the hidden stable behind the water-curtain. "How is it with you and my star pupil? I like to know that those whom I have wedded go strong together in their joinings—"

  I laughed, and balanced the saddles on the wall between the looseboxes. "Oh, we are well wedded, you and my lord Gwyn did your joinery to last. Morgan sends you greeting," I added as we left the stables, making the damp noisy scuttle behind the falls to the great guarded gate. "As do Artos and Gwennach; but you will know that."

  Birogue smiled. "I will, and I do. But it was none of them that sent you here, I think."

  "Majanah, Jamadarin of the Yamazai, bade me come,—she read it in my hand, and so I am here."

  We had halted before the huge silver gate I remembered, and as before I divested myself of all the steel I bore upon me. As once she had done long ago, once more Birogue laid her hand upon the gate, and once more the magic barrier swung silently wide for us, and we passed through, into Dun Aengus.

  We went this time not to the majestic hall with the silver walls and golden roof and the crystal throne whence Nudd, King of the Sidhe, disposed his majesty and rule over his folk, but to a smaller chamber, no less fair, hung about with tapestries and lit with sconces.

  "This is my dwelling-place here in Dun Aengus," said Birogue, shedding her gray cloak and taking mine from my shoulders. "Though I go still to Collimare—My home is here now."

  I seated myself where she bade me, accepted a cup of cool ale and a soft whiteflour bannock enclosing a grilled meat and a cut of half-melted cheese; I was hungry, and the food had savor and sustenance.

  Birogue watched with a wistful smile; then, when I looked my question, "It is not every Kelt would feel safe to fare and feed in the halls of the Sidhe."

  I waved my goblet dismissively. "More fools they, then. Am I to insult the law of the coire ainsec, which is the same under the hill as upon the land, and, very like, beneath the wave? I think not—any road, did you wish to keep me here, other ways there are than stuffing and sating."

  "Well spoken, Lord Taliesin," came a cool voice that was most definitely not Birogue's, and I leaped to my feet before I could see who it was had spoken, and hastily wiped face and fingers with the mealcloth I had been given.

  She came in unattended: Seli the queen, wife to Nudd ap Llyr, mother to Gwyn—and to Edeyrn. I made her a deeper, longer reverence than ever I would have made to Gweniver Ard-rian, and looked her in the face as I straightened from my bow.

  She was no whit changed from the time I had last beheld her, what, twenty years since, had it been? Hair like soft flame, eyes like emeralds in the rock—and her younger son was slain, dead at mortal hands…

  She saw what I was thinking, and nodded once. "Be not shamed for that, Talyn," she said. "All is dan—aye, did you think we of the hill did not ourselves answer to dan even as do you? Truly! If it is not quite the same for us as it is for you, it is dan all the same, and we too are bound to its call."

  "And free of it also," said Birogue softly.

  "That too," agreed Seli after a pause. "But there are reasons for your coming beyond the courtesies of bards."

  "Aye," I said, and drew the deepest breath of my life. "Once before, Lady, in this palace where now we stand, you promised me an answer to a question I never have dared to ask. You spoke of my mother, and you told me of the friendship you and she shared." I threw a glance over my shoulder. "And the Lady Birogue, too, claimed her friendship, here under the hill. I would know—would know of my mother, and how she came to die. My father never told me, my sibs have never spoken of it. You have said you would." I ceased, trembling with a terrible inward shivering; my nerve-net was flittering like the skin of a borraun in thunder-rain, and my voice was that of a child fighting back tears. Which is worse, to know the truth whatsoever it might be or to so fear the knowing?

  Seli made no answer, but gestured me to seat myself again, and did so herself. After a hesitation, I took my chair once more, fists clenched now, a knot forming between my shoulder-blades. Birogue moved behind and beside Seli's chair, and did not look at me.

  When the silence had grown all but unbearable, and I thinking to run screaming back the way we had come, to throw myself onto the stone fangs that lay in the roaring pool below Sychan's curtain, Seli raised her eyes to me and spoke.

  "Have you never wondered, Taliesin, that you were born so late after the rest of your sibs?"

  I was at a strange place within myself: ravelled and quivering with my fear and doubt, but also clear and cold and unexpectant; and so her question seemed not at all off the mark.

  "Well—sometimes, truly, I have wondered. There are twenty years between me and the next-nearest, Shelia and Rainild—twins they were, both dead now—a score of years between them and myself."

  "There is more than years between you, Taliesin," said Birogue, and now she too was watching me, her eyes silver in the golden light. "Your sibs were bound by your father to keep it from you, but you and they come of different stock. You are all of you children of Gwyddno, that brave kind lord; but you, Taliesin, had a different mother than the rest."

  If I had not been safely seated, I think I would have met the floor; as it was, my entire body felt as if I had taken a step that was not there, or missed a step that was. And yet what Birogue had said, carried, somehow, the immediate solid ring of truth. This was real, this was true, this had happened. This was mine,—and now I was about to learn how Arthur had felt, so long ago…

  "Then—" was all I managed to croak, and stared helplessly, desperately, at Seli. She met my eyes full on, and through and past them, and I knew then why all the old chaunts and ballads warn against gazing into the eyes of the Sidhe.

  "The Lady Medeni was your mother, as you have been told. But she was not the woman who gave birth to you. That lady, who was valiant and lovely and wise, was your father's ban-charach. The rest of your sibs are children of Medeni and your father,—but you are of Gwyddno and your mother's begetting. Now Medeni loved you as her own child: She was a woman of great benevolence and warmth, older than your mother by many years, and she took up gladly the care of you when your mother came here to be with us."

  "And just why, Lady, did my mother come here?" My voice sounded harsh as a hawk's cry in my own ears.

  Birogue it was who answered, and I thought I would die of the gentleness in her tone.

  "She came here, Taliesin, because she was dying, and we thought thereby to save her, for her years were but eight-and-forty."

  I wrenched the words out now past a disabling muteness, as if someone had laid a spear-haft across my throat and set a foot upon it.

  "How can that be? Kelts are but youths at such an age, even under Edeyrn we did not die so young—save in battle. It cannot have been so!"

  And now it came, the spear's bladed point. "It was so, Talyn, for that your mother was no Kelt. She was a woman of Earth."

  I felt the words falling upon me, blows struck from a very long way away. I was—well, I have no words for how I was, I a bard, wordless. And yet I could not say I was surprised: All the little things over the years that had flagged a puzzle and a mystery, things that my own brothers and sisters would not speak of, not even Tegau to whom I was closer than to all the rest together… Of Earth. My mother was of Earth. I was half a Terran.

  Birogue was speaking again. "Your father, Talyn, went on the very last of the secret voyages Kelts made back to Earth, the immram-tuathal. All the more daring, for that it was made in Edeyrn's despite: Kelts had been returning to Earth, on rare occasions, to be sure, since first these worlds were settled; for adventure, or curiosity, or even to pillage ideas. They seldom if ever revealed themselves to the Earthfolk save in the very earliest days, when they were still helping stranded Kelts to come away. But your father and his comrades had a different, graver purpose: They went in hopes of getting Earth's aid against the Marbh-draoi. They failed, and so returned
."

  "But not without bringing away a few more souls as brave as they," said Seli. "When they came to Earth, they made contact with certain Terrans whom they had kenned from afar. Terrans whose natural gifts had run along the same track as your own—and they were not afraid! Nay, they were glad, and they told the visitors, to all their sorrow, how it was on Earth just then; they were themselves beset by war, had a Marbh-draoi of their own… When your father and his company despaired of getting the help they sought, and prepared to return again to Keltia, these Terrans begged to be permitted to come also, though they were told of how it was here just then. And leave was given them: They were the very last of Earth to come to Keltia, and maybe ever will be."

  "And my mother?"

  "She was one of the first to ask to come—your father fell in love with her, and though he was already wedded to Medeni, and had six children by her, he brought your mother home with him. They contracted a ceile-charach union, and you were born to them twenty years later."

  I was beyond all thought or reason by now, sat there shaking as with fever, dully listening, letting it fall upon me,—though whether I truly heard was another matter…

  Birogue spoke so softly now. "She became my dear friend; in those days I came often to Tair Rhamant, that small fair place, and others of our kin too."

  "If they so loved—how came it that it took twenty years before my birth?"

  For the first time, Seli smiled. "Not for the same reasons it has taken Arthur and Gweniver so long, I can assure you! Nay, perhaps it was merely a matter of breeding—the strain your mother brought from Earth perhaps needed time to adapt itself to Keltic bloodlines… But then she sickened in earnest," and now Seli did not smile. "A sickness of Earth, maybe, naught that we could treat, not even here, where Gwyddno brought her when mortal healers failed. But we made her comfortable and happy—she was our friend—she did not suffer, save only from weakness at the last, and she died here under the hill, with Gwyddno and my son Gwyn beside her, and Birogue and Merlynn Llwyd and I myself to ease her passing."