Skin

by Ilka Tampke

  I hung, suspended by the cord, by the song. Beneath me was an infinite dark. Above me was the light. And the song. I looked up and I pushed the sword back into its sheath. I could not defy this sound.

  Slowly I placed both hands around the cord and began to shunt myself up. It took many hours to make the ascent. Soon my shoulders ached and I was dripping with sweat. It was only the song, ever louder, that urged me on. Just as I could not heave myself up one more length, the cord thickened, becoming fleshy, muscular. Then it was a hand and an arm and I was being pulled back into the lap of the old woman.

  But when I opened my eyes, it was not her, but the flat ground that cradled me, and the fire that warmed me. I lifted my under-robe and rubbed the place where the cord had attached. Now there was only smooth skin and some tenderness where it had pulled.

  Still the air was full of song. I looked up to see a river of women in ceremonial furs surging past me, down the mountain. Straightaway I recognised their bearing, though I had not seen their faces before. I was indeed with the Mothers. It was their singing that had called me back from the fall. With a gasp, I recalled what Sulis had told me and I reeled with the question: had my long night been of the Mothers’ realm? Were they preparing me to be Kendra? It could not be so. I was not ready.

  Hesitantly I rose to follow them, my hair whipping in the wind, then I paused and turned back. I wanted to see the view from this height. At the summit’s edge, I drew breath in wonder. I had never seen so much of the world. Woodlands, meadows, mist-crowned rises, iridescent rivers and, beyond these, the endless lake, all spread in a vast living cloth. In the distance I saw the hill that marked the salmon’s nose, the river of its spine and the jutting stones of its tail tips. The totems of dog, crow and many others were clear also, marked in the earth as they were in the night sky. I saw the land’s stories of which Llwyd had spoken.

  Through the howling wind, the Mothers’ chant drifted up the hill. I walked to the other side of the summit and peered down. Hundreds of women, all singing, were pouring into the flatlands beneath the Tor. This was not just one group of Mothers, nor two, nor three. All the Mothers were assembling.

  I scrabbled down the path, behind the women who descended, their sound unceasing. I alone did not sing.

  At the base of the mountain I stood against a sheared stone bank and watched the Mothers gather in their circles, in turn making one great circle around a central fire. For what purpose did they gather? I shrank further back against the crumbling earth.

  The greater circle was nearly complete. As the last women trailed in from the forest paths, my heart jumped.

  ‘Tara!’ I rushed forward to greet her.

  She did not break her song, but her eyes told me she was pleased to see me and I took refuge beside her. ‘Is this all of the Mothers?’ I whispered.

  Tara nodded, still singing.

  ‘Tell me of them,’ I said.

  She halted her song and looked to the circle beside us. ‘They are the Mothers of grain.’ She turned to the next. ‘They keep the language, and they the children…’ One by one, she named each of the knowledges: nine I had not yet been called to learn, and one that I had. Steise and the Mothers of change stood across the great circle. I craned, searching for Taliesin, but he was not among them.

  Tara nodded to the women who had sung me back from the fall. ‘They are the Mothers who keep the renewal of laws. And she—’ she pointed to an old woman who stood at the heart of the circle, raised high on a platform of interwoven branches, ‘—she alone keeps the twelfth lesson.’

  It was the woman who had cradled me as I fell.

  ‘She is the Mother who makes us all one.’ Tara glanced at me. ‘Once you have met with her, you will not return to the Mothers.’

  I stared at Tara in shock. I had met with the old woman. But surely this could not be my last time with the Mothers? For if it was, I could not yet bring back Taliesin.

  Tara took up her tone again and motioned that I leave. Distressed, I walked back, beyond the circles, to listen and watch.

  The old woman stood with her arms raised, her gaze flickering around the circles. Then slowly, when every eye was upon her, she lowered her arms and the Mothers were silent.

  She held one hand out to Tara’s circle, the Mothers of fire, summoning their song. When the sound was strong, she used her other hand to call for another group and then a third. The exquisite blend of the three tones coiled through the air, soothing my fears and winding around my spirit.

  With this, the old woman began an intricate dance of gestures, silencing one circle, summoning another, calling five, six, even ten at once. I listened spellbound as, with threads of song, she wove the fabric of the world around me.

  I looked up at the great Tor and the trees covering it. They were made of song as much as of wood and earth and I could not tell if I was hearing or seeing them. The ground hummed beneath my feet and I looked up to a sky full of sound.

  This was the Singing, the birthing of our country.

  Slowly, I understood why skin was not part of the Mothers’ world. They were before skin, beyond it. Skin was what held the hardworld in place. Skin was our name for what they created.

  Slowly, I understood that our world could not exist unless the song was heard that made it so. And I was the woman who heard it for my people.

  There was an abrupt silence as the old woman quieted the Mothers and raised her left hand high above her head. I watched her, without breathing, as she lowered her arm toward the place where I stood, until finally it came to stillness pointing directly at me.

  I froze.

  She wanted me to sing. She wanted me to answer. But what would I sing? I had no skin. I had no song. I looked at the old woman and then around at the Mothers, all silent, all staring. I met Tara’s eye, then Steise’s.

  I opened my mouth and drew a lungful of air. My breath reached where it had never been, into the deepest core of my being, where I sensed something dislodge and take form. It rose from my core, then broke from my throat on trembling air. A note, as sweet and thin as a shoot of grass. And as it was uttered, it took root, strengthening, until it was as dense and textured as the ground beneath me.

  I knew it. It was my song. My part of all creation.

  I did not have skin, but I was the Kendra.

  The hardworld and the Mothers’ world are bridged by our Kendra. Only she can witness the making of time.

  THE SUN ROSE and set three times as we sang. Sometimes the women lay down to sleep. They left to drink water, to piss, or fuel the fire, but the song remained unbroken.

  During these days I learned the songs that made the mountain, the wind, the trees and the seasons. I heard the words that made the human and animal shapes, and I echoed them until I knew I would never forget them. Each circle of Mothers had a song for their part of the country. I remembered them all.

  By the Singing, I knew that I would never see the hardworld in the same way now. I would always hear the songs that gave it form. By the Singing, I knew the counsel that I would offer Llwyd and Fraid when I returned: we would fight the Roman forces. We would defend the songs with our lives. For without it, there would be no life.

  It was
the dawn of the fourth day. My legs ached from standing, my vision was blurred from tiredness but still I sang.

  The old woman summoned Tara and two others of the Fire Mothers to my side.

  Tara drew her knife.

  I knew what they were about to do. I trembled as the two Mothers braced my arms and Tara released the fastening of my robe. She placed a wad of tightly rolled linen into my mouth and raised her blade. The old woman summoned volume in the song. Every Mother was singing me into being. The sound was deafening.

  I buckled, biting hard on the linen as Tara cut a spiralling shape into my chest with her knife. The hot pain brought a deep release as blood dripped in the dirt at my feet. This was the wound that would hold the song. The scar that would mark me in the hardworld.

  Tara left my cut untended and returned with her women to their circle.

  I tried to resume my song but, in my exhaustion, my voice began to fail, and with it, my vision. The temple house emerged before me, its stones not solid but sheer as a veil, the circles of Mothers still visible behind it.

  I squeezed my eyes closed, but when they opened, the temple was yet clearer and I saw Sulis push through the door and walk toward me, a jug in her hand. ‘Sulis!’ I cried. I stood directly before her but she neither saw nor heard me. She did not witness that I stood with the Mothers as they sang.

  The Mothers’ song shifted, strengthened, and Sulis faded from sight.

  I stared hard at the circles of Mothers, watching and listening, before once again the temple huts and gardens took shape before me. My sister initiates were tending the temple grounds, chattering as they filled buckets from the pools. They were not firm-fleshed, but wrought of some mist that thickened then waned with the rise and fall of the song.

  This was no trick of the eye. This was my return to the hardworld.

  For most of the day I was cast backward and forward between these two visions. The Mothers’ song poured forth unbroken while the temple initiates carried out their tasks in the same place, the same moment. I saw both truths at once. One a little clearer, then the other.

  As the sky deepened, the temple at last grew solid and the circles of women ebbed away. As I watched them fade I felt a wash of grief, then I recalled Tara’s words and they hit me like a slingshot: I would not be called to the Mothers again.

  ‘Taliesin! Tara!’ I shouted, calling them back, swaying with the effort and the pain of my wound.

  The shape of the Mothers strengthened once more. I ran among them, searching and calling.

  Shrouded by trees, beyond the edge of the circle, he stood alone. At the sound of my voice he turned. I had never seen him look so fragile or so beautiful. He wore a summer tunic, dyed with bark, as dark as the shadows that ringed his eyes. The bones of his shoulders hunched forward as though caging his heart.

  ‘My light,’ he whispered into my hair when I reached him. ‘Can you free me? Have you learned of your skin?’

  I shook my head against his chest. ‘The woman who knows it will not yield.’ His heart quickened beneath my cheek and I tightened my hold. ‘There will be a way.’

  He pulled back to stare at me. ‘There is no other way.’

  Through the translucence of his throat and arms, I saw the faint forms of the temple huts. ‘No,’ I cried. I could not let him fade from me. By the force of my intent I hardened the realm and he was once again solid. But there was little strength in me to hold him much longer.

  Think, I commanded myself, over the crash of my heartpound. I searched my memory for the ways I had journeyed forth and back from the Mothers: by the drop in the pool, by the Mothers’ song, by cutting the mist in the gully. The mist! I gripped Taliesin’s forearms. Why had I not seen it before? ‘My love,’ I gasped, ‘when you come to the hardworld, is it always through water?’

  ‘Yes. As fish. I have told you—’

  ‘There has been no threshold, other than this?’

  The bones of his wrist started to soften as I grasped them. He was slipping. ‘There is another threshold.’ He frowned. ‘But one I cannot breach.’

  ‘Describe it,’ I urged.

  ‘It is a thickness, a barrier that rises near the river when you call to me. I have tried to push through it as man. Sometimes I see you beyond it. Once you even heard me call through it. But only as fish, beneath the water, can I pass.’

  I was shaking in my excitement. ‘Is it a mist? A watery barrier?’

  He nodded. ‘It is that.’

  Then I was laughing and sobbing. ‘Mothers be praised, Taliesin. If you can stand at that veil, then I have means to cut it. I can bring you through as man.’

  ‘How?’ he asked, unbelieving.

  ‘This!’ I cry, lifting the weapon still bound to my waist. ‘My sword has cut such a mist before. My sword will cut your passage.’

  ‘No.’ His face knotted with doubt. ‘No sword can cut the realms.’

  ‘But it has! It has cut through when skin could not.’

  His smile was unsure.

  My hold of him was weakening. In moments he would be gone. ‘You must go to that place,’ I told him. ‘You must stand at that mist.’

  ‘When?’ he breathed. ‘Now?’ His flesh grew yet sheerer.

  ‘Not now,’ I cried, desperate. ‘If I cut from here, I do not know where we will emerge. I must cut from Summer and bring you there.’ I looked to his face. ‘Beloved Taliesin, can you wait a little longer to come home?’

  He answered me with a kiss that turned my flesh to water.

  ‘Wait for my call,’ I instructed when he pulled away. ‘I will go to the forest and call for you. I beg that you hear it. But do not sink beneath the water. Do not come as fish. Find the mist and stand before it as man. That is my only chance to make you free.’

  He stared at me, his dark eyes ebbing. ‘Are you true?’

  I staggered. His wounds were deep to question a heart as sure as mine. He was dissolving quickly now.

  ‘Listen for my call!’ I commanded as he faded.

  He nodded, and met my gaze for one last moment. For the first time, I saw an echo of Cookmother’s eyes in his. It was too late to tell him now. I would tell him when he was free.

  He turned as he disappeared.

  It must be true, I assured myself. My sword would cut what lay between us. The Mothers had promised me this: if it took no life, it would do my will. And this, above all else, was my will. At last my legs, which had stood for four days, could carry me no longer and I sank to the ground.

  ‘Ailia?’ The sharp voice was familiar.

  I opened my eyes to see darkness had fallen.

  ‘Rise, girl.’ Sulis crouched beside me and aided me to sit.

  The temple garden was quiet now. The Mothers were gone.

  ‘Am I returned?’ I murmured, dizzy from change.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, scowling, ‘and I do not need to ask whether you have been with the Mothers. I see how you are drunk with journey.’ She offered me her water pouch and I drank thirstily. ‘How did you reach them?’ she asked. ‘By medicine? By chant?’

 
By my love of Taliesin, I wanted to answer, recalling the pool, the swim. ‘By their ways,’ I said.

  ‘By skin?’ she persisted.

  My face fell. ‘No.’

  Her eyes closed then opened, her brow furrowed. ‘You will not disturb the initiates with any account of this. You will sleep this night in my hut and resume training at sunrise.’

  I stared at her, terrified that she would not release me. ‘But—I cannot go back to my training,’ I stammered. ‘I must return to Cad—’

  ‘You have been almost three summers gone from temple. There is much you have missed.’

  Breath caught in my throat. Yet another year passed in a matter of days. I wanted, with all my being, to free Taliesin, but even more than this, I wanted to give my people their Kendra. Was it too late? ‘There is counsel I must give Fraid and Llwyd—’

  Sulis shook her head. Her voice could not contain her displeasure. ‘You have journeyed again to the Mothers without skin, without sanction. You are in breach of our most sacred laws.’ Her hands trembled as she interlocked them. ‘You will stay and resume your learning. And try to make right what you have wronged by these journeys.’

  ‘I have been given knowledge, Journeywoman! I must bring it to Cad—’

  She crouched unmoving. ‘What knowledge have you received?’

  I paused, suddenly frightened to utter it. But there could be only truth now. ‘The song,’ I answered. ‘I have heard the song.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Whose song?’

  ‘The Mothers’ song. The creation song.’