Generally I pay more attention to ritual, she thought, halting in her dance in Earth’s place. But ritual is symbol and this is the truth it speaks.
“Leave the fire and come with me
To walk beside the dreaming sea
And watch the fading of the stars
As the new day dawns!”
Cynthia Carson giggled and pushed her back to Air’s proper place.
“Your ribbon is blue!” she whispered and exploded into giggles again.
Órlaith felt herself flush to the roots of her hair, trying to keep her place in the circle.
Panpipes sounded, weaving themselves into the hymn. She skipped forward to the maypole set in the center. Fiorbhinn and Raghnall seized the silver and gold ribbons. Each pair of Maiden and Squire took the colored ribbon of their Attribute and backed away, turning the long ribbons into a net of colored tracery in the fire-shot darkness.
“We’ll try to catch time in our hands
To hold the wave against the sand
And watch this glow upon the land
That soon will be gone!”
The drums beat and Órlaith felt a shiver stroke her backbone, like the touch of a feather drawn from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck.
This year, she prayed. Mother-of-All, this year, when we are both together, please let him . . .
She hesitated, not sure what she wanted from Diarmuid this year. There was a sense of eyes opening at the back of existence. A presence . . . a Presence . . . fond and amused, gone before she could be sure it was anything but her own yearning. Like a warm breeze carrying with it a scent of cinnamon and musk.
The circle had danced forward and back, now pulling on the orange and purple ribbons. And the beat came and Órlaith danced, weaving in and out, over and over, hand touching each passing dancer, men tuathal, women deosil, invoking and evoking the spring, the growth, the green, the rain. And each time Diarmuid went past, he stroked her palm rather than swing her hand.
“So drum beat and flute sound
Once more we’ll circle ’round
For the world turns and the Wheel spins
And all ends that once begins!
This green hour, the heart knows,
Is brief as the budding rose
Though Wheel turn and bloom fade
The heart sings the birth of May!”
The ribbons tightened down as they danced and circled, binding the May Queen and May King in place, against the pole and each other, then the purple and orange ribbons closed upon her and the other Maidens and Squires, they were pressed forward, into the center, bound to the pole by the rest. The dancers halted and flung their hands up in a roar of laughter.
Órlaith heard the great shout and whispered, “Merry meet and merry part . . .”
“And merry get these ribbons gone!” she heard Raghnall grumble.
Delia came and tied the maypole ribbons tightly to the top above the heads of the May Queen and King and laughed, mischievous joy in her voice.
“So, Horned Lord, King of the Wood? Can you free yourself and take your prize?”
Maude stood beside Delia, laughing too.
“And free the Maidens and Squires that they may chase one another through the bowers!”
From the cocoon of ribbons Raghnall began to saw at the tangle of tough smooth fabric with the flint blade tucked into his breechclout, the cloth parting to the touch of the keen stone. By custom he should have taken the May Queen by the hand and led her to the Queen’s Bower. Instead he caught her up in his arms and dashed headlong away, flourishing his antlers and giving a startlingly realistic bull-elk call, while Fiorbhinn laughed and threw up her arms in a theatrical gesture of helplessness. Maude paused thunderstruck. Out at the edge of darkness Juniper thumped her staff on the ground and laughed as well.
Órlaith was falling back when a feather touch on her shoulder brought her head around and her lips into a kiss.
“Diarmuid!” she gasped and then her hand darted forward, grasping and pulling at the wreath that encircled the gilded spikes of his antlers.
It broke and came away in her hand. By the law of the rite he must follow now; she darted away, hearing his sudden laugh, and knew him to be behind her. She ran, darting through the many people who cheered as she passed, calling luck-bringing—and bawdy—encouragement. Her legs kicked high, the skirts of the robe flying. As she ran, sweet heat gathered in her chest, and curled out, like a leaf uncurling in May indeed.
Diarmuid sprang ahead, spread his arms and she fled down another path, doubled back.
“By Flidais!” she invoked, trying to dodge under his arms and back to the main path. He caught her by the waist, spinning her around and up, and up and up, his horns falling off, her flower wreaths disintegrating into showers of petals. His lips sought hers, questing at first and then as her body took fire, becoming more insistent, more demanding. She gasped as he lifted his face and looked around.
“Where . . .” he asked, distractedly. Órlaith blinked and cast a quick glance at the woods.
“Here!” she said. “I was with the crew that prepared this stretch.”
“A pity,” murmured Diarmuid, “a pity. I set up a bower I hoped to bring you to.”
Órlaith giggled, “But so did I! It’s a little farther up!”
There was another bower, just behind them, with an oiled tarp, strewn with petals, a hay mattress, two quilts, one old, one new, one blue, one green, pillows and at the far end, a small box that would have wine and nibblements for later.
“They do say that it’s bad luck to use the one you set up.”
Órlaith hiked her skirts to get at the boots and squeaked when Diarmuid let himself fall like a tree next to her on the hay tick.
She yanked them off and he laughed. . . .
“Something borrowed!” he said holding up a pair of socks.
She was laughing, but it seemed to catch in her throat as Diarmuid leaned over her. “Shall I put them on you?”
She blushed furiously. “Not, not, not now. Diarmuid!”
He was bending for another kiss, but pulled back: “Yes, Golden Girl?”
“Bah!” she said, her embarrassed mood breaking, “You would tease on that! Diarmuid, have you? I mean, I, ah . . .”
He sat up abruptly. “Haven’t,” he said shortly.
Órlaith opened her mouth, looked at the tense back and flopped back. “Oh, thank goodness.”
He turned swiftly, “Thank goodness?”
“Thank Goddess. It seems right to learn with somebody. All my tutors teach me, but this, this should be different and special.”
His dark blue eyes lightened and he stroked a hand down her cheek. “Can I kiss every inch of your body?”
“Well, you can, but from all I’ve heard, it’s not going to last very long.”
“Yes, that’s what Da told me, and all the older boys say the same.”
“And the girls to me!”
“So if we can’t make one time last, let’s see how many times we can do! And that will take us to the dawn!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
County of Napa, Crown Province of Westria
(Formerly California)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
April 29th, Change Year 46/2044 AD
“Speak to me, they speak to me
Of sky and wind, of sea and stone
Of moss and fern and cedar tree
Of cliffs where wild arbutus grow!”
Hooves beat through the mild spring warmth beneath the song as the Royal party and its escort of lancers and longbowmen and train of pack-beasts and varlets made their way south. It was as small a group as the High King of Montival and his heir could get away with on such a long trip to the wild frontier and not have Lord Chancellor Ignatius make yet another attempt to retire to his monastery in protest. The air was thick with birdsong, and swirls of Tortoiseshell butterflies rose before the hooves of the mounted
party.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
Of orcas gliding through the deep
Of eagles balancing the wind
Above the waves where salmon leap . . .”
Threescore voices and a troubadour’s mandolin across Heuradys d’Ath’s saddlebow carried the swooping melody, everybody in the party who could sing and wasn’t too self-conscious to do so in the High King’s presence. Crown Princess Órlaith Arminger Mackenzie carried the tune effortlessly; she had a fine and well-trained contralto. There was the slightest tinge of envy in her enjoyment of the song; it was one of her Aunt Fiorbhinn’s, her father’s youngest half-sister and commonly thought to be the finest Mackenzie bard of her generation, if not the best in all Montival.
Órlaith had tried her own hand at composing songs and decided she was never going to be better than middling at it. That there were people who’d praise anything she did made it worse. Fiorbhinn was the daughter of one Mackenzie chieftain and the sister of another, but those weren’t positions that made you the target of would-be flatterers.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
Of deer that browse the twilight fields
Of stony heron keeping watch
For what the silver sea might yield.”
She couldn’t even feel very envious; she’d always regarded Fiorbhinn as more of an elder sister—something she didn’t have, being the oldest of five herself. John was the closest to her in age, and they were close in other ways, shared a lot of interests . . . he actually was a talented troubadour . . . but he was male. And a Christian at that. There were things you just didn’t discuss with a brother, or a sister in her early teens. And having the said sisters confide in you just wasn’t quite the same, glad though she usually was to serve as sounding board and wailing wall.
Thank the Lord and Lady for Herry, she thought, not for the first time. We’re near enough the same age—two years don’t matter anymore—and we’re both of the Old Religion, but she’s an Associate not a Mackenzie. She really understands.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
Of what has been and what endures
Of summer’s bloom and autumn’s fade
In the circling of the years.”
The valley was a flattish plain on either side of the south-flowing river, bounded by low mountains to the west and lower ones to the east, opening out irregularly like a funnel southward towards the great Bay. She looked about as she sang, their voices startling flights of birds out of the brush and long grass, sometimes dense enough that they looked like climbing, twining skeins of air and smoke.
“Speak to me, they speak to me
In voices humming in my bone
In whispers rising on my breath
In languages that tell of home!”
The inland hills of the Vaca Range were distant; you could just see how they were covered in rippling grass just turning from deep green to gold with tongues of woodland stretching up the ravines that scored them and clumps of blue oak and chaparral. Closer and westward the heights of the Mayacamas were dense-shaggy with forest, fir and pine and more. The air was warm and scented with smells stronger and spicier than the northern lands of her birth, arbutus and thyme and fennel. The broken remains of terraces showed here and there under the foothill brush.
“What do you think of Fiorbhinn’s latest?” the High King asked her, as they finished.
“Wonderful, and spreading like a grass fire in the Palouse,” she said. “Of course!”
“Your mother has told me for years that we need . . . what did they call it in the old days . . . a national anthem. A song everyone in Montival can like, that speaks to our love for the land itself. I think this may be it, and I’ll talk to Fiorbhinn about that . . . hmmm . . . perhaps a few more verses about mountains and deserts . . .”
“And a proud castle with banners or two, Your Majesty,” Heuradys said with an irrepressible grin. “For the north-realm.”
“That too, Herry,” he laughed.
Her fingers strayed to another tune, then to an occasional plucked note and to silence. They rode quietly for a while, to enjoy a land strange and foreign to them all; he was an easy man to be quiet with.
“Go n-ithe an cat thú,” Órlaith cursed mildly as her horse stumbled, bringing the animal up with light hands and a firm grip of thigh and knee. “May the cat eat you, Dancer, and keep your mind to what you’re about!”
Her black courser had caught a hoof on what was left of an old dead grape-vine, one of the innumerable thousands hidden by hock-high wild mustard. The main north–south road down the Napa Valley had suffered generations of summer wind and sun, winter flood and frost before the first Montivallan settlers arrived a few years ago, and they’d not yet done more than patch a few of the more manageable holes with dirt and gravel. Where the gaps in the ancient sun-faded asphalt were too wide traffic simply swerved westward away from the river, leaving ruts and trampled patches.
“That’s harsh, a stór,” her father chuckled. “Mind, my treasure, it’s not Dancer’s fault.”
They were speaking Gaeilge, for practice sake; there weren’t many people in Montival who could, though Heuradys had learned it for friendship’s sake. Her father’s mother Juniper, the founder and first Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, had learned it from her mother, who’d been born across the eastern sea, and taught it to her son and granddaughter both. It was a family tradition, and many clansfolk took the odd word or phrase from it, just as they’d copied her way of speaking in the early years and taken up the faith she and her core of early followers practiced. Over the generations the origins of customs and speech both had evolved from memory to legend for most.
Which is fair enough, Órlaith thought, remembering things her grandmother Juniper had said to her. For what is the world of humankind, if not a story we tell each other so that we may live in it together?
“This is a difficult patch, for horses,” he went on.
“The ancients must all have been drunk as Dáithí’s pig seven days of the week and blind drunk the whole of Beltane month,” she said, stroking the mare’s neck. “I like a glass of wine as well as the next, but this is ridiculous! The whole valley must have been solid vineyards from east to west and north to south!”
“Now there’s an elevating thought!” Heuradys said.
The High King laughed. “You just might think so,” he said, with a wave of his arm. “Still, it’s a bonny stretch of land, and at least they didn’t cover the fields with buildings.”
Some of the innumerable vines on the flat were still alive, monstrous house-sized tangled ground-hugging networks of shoots green with leaves or bone-hard and bare, sometimes climbing over a tree or snag of old building like a cresting vegetable wave caught in midmotion. More were dead gnarled knotted stumps, lurking among the tall grass and wild mustard and dense drifts of flaming gold California poppies, the brush and eucalyptus and oak and spreading feral olives. Even dead they lasted like iron.
A sound came from the southward, a deep rhythmic moaning coughing grunt, building to a shattering roar, loud even miles distant. The horses all shied a little. The humans frowned or grinned according to their natures. Something deep down in you whispered what that call meant: man-eater.
“And perhaps that was just a wee bit of an unfortunate way to swear,” Órlaith’s father chuckled. “Seeing as cats with a voracious and unreasonable appetite for horseflesh swarm upon the earth hereabouts.”
Órlaith had been well tutored in ecology—which she’d enjoyed far more than the rest of the Classical curriculum inflicted on her, since that science still worked as it had before the Change. Tigers were common in most parts of Montival that weren’t too dry and open, descended from zoo and park and private specimens sentimental owners had turned loose as the ancient world went down in wreck. Lions were not, being less common before the Change and much less able to adapt to cold winters after it. Down here in what had been California you met them more and more often as you
went south, since they did like warm, dry open landscapes.
“Now, that would make an interesting rug,” Heuradys said speculatively. “You up for a lion-hunt, Órry?”
“Now it is not as lion-food I have raised the Princess,” her father said, then raised a hand: “But if lions were to try for our horses, of course, that would be another matter.”
They’d seen mule deer, tule elk, feral horses and cattle, a troop of baboons, wild boar and flocks of emu and ostrich since they left the half-built castle at Rutherford, as well as scat and prints of tiger and wolf and distant glimpses of grizzly. A herd of lyre-horned antelope with tan coats and pale bellies had been grazing in the middle distance but giving the humans alertly nervous looks now and then. They took flight when the lion’s roar added an extra dose of fear and white tails flashed as they bounced away like rubber balls in astonishing near-vertical leaps that she’d read were called pronking, ultimately derived from the same distant land as the lions via curious institutions the ancients had called safari parks.
Órlaith smiled at the sight, and Heuradys strummed the mandolin in time to the leaps, as if giving them musical accompaniment. The springboks lifted your heart to watch, and they looked as thoroughly at home as the flocks of yellow-breasted chats that rose like handfuls of flung gold coins as they passed, going wheet-wheet-wheet in protest.
More soberly, her father added: “And there were so many of the ancients. More in just one of the cities on the Bay south of here than in all our Montival even today. More than enough to drink the fruit of all these vines.”
She nodded. She knew that, and unlike some of the tales she believed it down in her gut. Anyone did who’d seen the ruins and thought a little rather than just treating them as part of the landscape, though her generation was less haunted by it than their parents, and infinitely less than those who’d survived the great dying. That was why this land was empty. When the machines stopped hordes had eaten the countryside bare everywhere close enough to reach, then turned on each other amid plague and fire and horror. A few of their savage descendants still haunted the land, but only a handful of tiny civilized settlements tucked away in remoteness had greeted the explorers from the north. Mostly they’d been touchingly joyful to rejoin humankind.
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