Prologue

A cold wind was whipping the torches into fiery tails. Angry light glittered on the dark waters of the strait and the shields of the legionaries waiting on the other side. The priestess coughed at the reek of smoke and sea fog and listened to the clangor of camp Latin echoing across the waters as the Roman commander harangued his men. The Druids sang out in answer, calling down the wrath of the skies, and thunder shook the air.

Women's voices rose in a shrill ululation that sent a chill through her body, or perhaps it was fear. She swayed with the other priestesses, arms raised in imprecation; their dark cloaks flaring out like raven wings.

But the Romans were howling too, and now the first rank surged into the water. The Druid war harp throbbed with a dreadful music, and her throat was scraped raw with shrieking, but still the enemy came on.

The first red-cloaked soldier set foot on the shore of the Holy Isle and the gods did not strike him. Now the singing faltered. A priest pushed the priestess behind him as Roman steel caught the torchlight; the sword fell and blood sprayed across her dark robe.

The rhythm of the chant was lost. Now there was only screaming and she ran for the trees. Behind her the Romans were scything the Druids down like grain. Too quickly, they finished, and the red tide swept inland.

The priestess stumbled through the trees, seeking the sacred circles. An orange glow filled the sky above the House of Women. The stones loomed up ahead, but from behind her came shouting. She turned at bay, clinging to the central altar stone. Now, surely, they would kill her . .. She called out to the Goddess and straightened, waiting for the blow.

But it was not weapons of steel they meant to use against her. She struggled as hard hands grabbed at her body, tearing off her robes. They forced her down upon the stone, and then the first man battered against her. There was no escape; she could only use the sacred disciplines to withdraw her mind from this body until they were done. But as awareness winged away, she cried out: "Lady of Ravens, avenge me! Avenge!"

"Avenge . . ." My own shout woke me, and I sat up, staring. As always, it took a few moments for me to realize that it was only a dream, and not even my own, for I was still a child in the year when the Legions murdered the priests and raped the women of the Holy Isle; an unwanted girl-child called Caillean, safe in Hibernia across the sea. But since first I heard the story, soon after the Priestess of the Oracle brought me to this land, the spirits of those women have haunted me.

The curtain at my door fluttered and one of the maidens who served me looked in. "My Lady, are you well? May I help you to robe? It is almost time to greet the dawn."

I nodded, feeling the cold sweat dry on my brow, and allowed her to help me into a clean gown and arrange the ornaments of a High Priestess on my breast and brow. Then I followed her out on to the summit of another isle, a green Tor that rose from the mingling of marsh and meadow that men call the Summer Sea. From below came the singing of the maidens who watch over the sacred well, and from the vale beyond it the bell that calls the hermits to prayer in the little beehive church beside the white thorn tree.

They were not the first folk to seek sanctuary on this island at the end of the world beyond the narrow seas, nor do I suppose they will be the last. So many years have passed since the death of the Holy Isle, and though in my dreams ancient voices still cry out for revenge, a hard-won wisdom tells me that the mixing of blood strengthens a breed, so long as the ancient knowledge is not lost.

But to this day I have never found any good in the Romans or their ways. This is why even for Eilan, who was dearer than a daughter to me, I could never trust in any Roman, not even Gaius, whom she loved.

But no tramping of iron-shod legionary sandals on stone-paved roads disturbs us here, for I have cast a veil of mist and mystery to keep out the straight-edged Roman world.

Today, perhaps, I will tell the maidens the story of how we came here, for between the destruction of the House of Women on the Isle of Mona and the return of the priestesses to the Isle of Apples, the women of the Druids dwelt at Vernemeton, the Forest House, and that story must not be forgotten.

It was there that I learned the Mysteries of the Goddess and taught them in turn to Eilan daughter of Rheis, who became the greatest High Priestess and, some would say, the greatest traitor to her people of all. But through Eilan the blood of the Dragon and the Eagle have mingled with the blood of the Wise, and in the hour of greatest need that line will always come to Britain's aid.

In the marketplace men say that Eilan was the Romans' victim, but I know better. In its time the Forest House preserved the Mysteries, and the gods do not require that we all be conquerors, or even that we all be wise, but only that we serve the truth that we are given until we can pass it on.

My priestesses are gathering around me, singing. I lift my hands, and as the sun strikes through the mists I bless the land.

One

Shafts of golden light shone through the trees as the setting sun dropped below the clouds, outlining each new-washed leaf in gold. The hair of the two girls who were making their way along the forest path glowed with the same pale fire. Earlier in the day there had been rain. The thick, uncleared forest that still covered much of the south of Britain lay damp and quiet, and a few low boughs still shook scattered drops like a blessing across the path.

Eilan breathed deeply of the moist air, heavy with all the living scents of the woods and sweet as incense after the smoky atmosphere of her father's hall. In the Forest House, she had been told, they used sacred herbs to purify the air. Instinctively she straightened, trying to walk like one of the priestesses who dwelt there, lifting the basket of offerings in her best imitation of their balanced grace. For a moment, then, her body moved with a rhythm both unfamiliar and completely natural, as if she had been trained to do this in some ancient past.

Only since her moonblood began had she been allowed to bring the offerings to the spring. As her monthly cycle made her a woman, said her mother, so the waters of the sacred spring were the fertility of the land. But the rituals of the Forest House served its spirit, bringing down the Goddess herself at the full of the moon. The moon had been full the night before and before her mother called her in, Eilan had stood for a long time staring up at it, filled with an expectancy she could not define.

Perhaps the Priestess of the Oracle will claim me for the Goddess at the Beltane festival. Closing her eyes, Eilan tried to imagine the blue robes of a priestess trailing behind her, and the veil shadowing her features with mystery.

"Eilan, what are you doing?" Dieda's voice startled her back to awareness, she stumbled over a tree root and nearly dropped the basket. "You are lagging like a lame cow! It will be dark before we get back to the hall if we do not finish soon."

Recovering, Eilan hurried after the other girl, blushing furiously. But already she could hear the gentle murmur of the spring. In another moment the path dropped downward, and she followed Dieda to the cleft where the waters trickled out from between two rocks and fell into the pool. In some time long past men had set stones around it; over the years the water had worn their spiraled carvings smooth. But the hazel to whose branches folk tied their wishing ribbons was young, the descendant of many trees that had grown there.

They settled themselves beside the pool and spread a cloth for the offerings, exquisitely prepared cakes, a flask of mead, and some silver coins. It was only a small pool, after all, where the minor goddess of this forest had her dwelling, not one of the holy lakes where whole armies sacrificed the treasures they had won, but for many years the women of her line had brought her their offerings every month after their moon-times, that their link to the Goddess might be renewed.

Shivering a little in the cool air, they pulled off their gowns and bent over the pool.

"Sacred spring, you are the womb of the Goddess. As your waters cradle all life, may I bear new life into the world . . ." Eilan scooped up water and let it trickle over her belly and between her thighs.

"Sacred spring, your waters are the milk of the Goddess. As you feed the world, let me nourish those I love . . ." Her nipples tingled as the cool water touched them.

"Sacred spring, you are the spirit of the Goddess. As your waters well for ever from the depths, give me the power to renew the world . .." She trembled as the water bathed her brow.

Eilan stared into the shadowed surface, seeing the pale glimmer of her reflection take shape as the waters stilled once more. But as she stared into the water, the face that stared back at her changed. She saw an older woman with even paler skin, and dusky curls in which red highlights glinted like sparks of flame, though the eyes were the same.

"Eilan!"

As Dieda spoke, Eilan blinked, and the face looking back at her from the water was her own once more. Her kinswoman was

shivering, and suddenly Eilan felt cold as well. Hastily, they pulled on their clothes. Then Dieda reached for the basket of cakes, and her voice soared, rich and true, in the song.

"Lady of the sacred spring,

To thee these offerings I bring;

For life and luck and love I pray,

Goddess, accept these gifts today."

In the Forest House, thought Eilan, there would be a chorus &f priestesses to sing the song. Her own voice, thin and a little wavering, blended with Dieda's in an oddly pleasing harmony.

"Bless now the forest and the field,

That they their bounty to us yield;

May kin and kine be hale and whole,

Safeguard the body and the soul!"

Eilan poured mead from the flask into the water while Dieda crumbled the cakes and cast them into the pool. The current swirled them away, and for a moment it seemed to Eilan that its sound had grown louder. The two girls leaned over the water, letting drop the coins they had brought.

As the ripples stilled, Eilan saw their two faces, so alike, mirrored together. She stiffened, fearing to see the stranger there once more, but as her sight darkened, this time there was only one face, with eyes that shone in the water like stars in the dark sea of heaven.

"Lady, are you the spirit of the pool? What do you want from me?" her heart asked. And it seemed to her that words came in reply:

"My life flows through all waters, as it flows through your veins. I am the River of Time and the Sea of Space. Through many lives you have been mine. Adsartha, my daughter, when will you fulfill your vows to Me?"

It seemed to her then that from the Lady's eyes flashed brightness that illuminated her soul, or perhaps it was sunlight, for when she came to herself she was blinking into the radiance that flared through the trees.

"Eilan!" Dieda said in the tone of one who is repeating a summons for the second time. "What is wrong with you today?"

"Dieda!" Eilan exclaimed. "Didn't you see Her? Didn't you see the Lady in the pool?"

Dieda shook her head. "You sound like one of those holy bitches at Vernemeton, babbling of visions!"

"How can you say that? You're the Arch-Druid's daughter - at the Forest House you could be trained as a bard!"

Dieda frowned. "A female bard? Ardanos would never allow it, nor would I want to spend my life mewed up with a gaggle of women. I'd rather join the Ravens with your foster brother Cynric and fight Rome!"

"Hush!" Eilan looked around her as if the trees had ears. "Don't you know better than to speak of that, even here? Besides, it's not fighting you want to do at Cynric's side, but to lie there - I've seen how you look at him!" She grinned.

Now Dieda was blushing. "You know nothing about it!" she exclaimed. "But your time will come, and when you grow foolish over some man it will be my turn to laugh." She began to fold up the cloth.

"I never will," said Eilan. "I want to serve the Goddess!" And for a moment then her sight darkened and the murmur of the water seemed to grow louder, as if the Lady had heard. Then Dieda was thrusting the basket into her hands.

"Let's go home." She started up the path. But Eilan hesitated, for it seemed to her that she had heard something that was not the sound of the spring.

"Wait! Do you hear that? From over by the old boar pit -"

Dieda stopped, her head turning, and they heard it again, fainter now, like an animal in pain.

"We'd best go and see," she said finally, "though it will make us late getting home. But if something has fallen in, the men will have to come and put it out of its misery."

The boy lay shaken and bleeding at the bottom of the boar pit, his hopes of rescue fading with the ebbing light.

The pit where he lay was dank and foul, smelling of the dung of animals trapped there in the past. Sharp stakes were set into the bottom and sides of the pit; one of these stakes had pierced his shoulder - not a dangerous wound, he judged, nor even particularly painful as yet, for the arm was still numb with the force of his fall. But still, slight though it was, it was likely to kill him.

Not that he was afraid to die; Gaius Macellius Severus Siluricus was nineteen years old and had sworn his oaths to the Emperor Titus as a Roman officer. He had fought his first battle before the down was thick on his face. But to die because he had blundered like a silly hare into a deadfall made him angry. It was his own fault, Gaius thought bitterly. If he had listened to Clotinus Albus, he would now be sitting by a warm fire, drinking the beer of the South Country and flirting with his host's daughter, Gwenna — who had put off the chaste ways of the up-country Britons and adopted the bolder manners and bearing of girls in Roman towns like Londinium as easily as her father had adopted the Latin tongue and toga.

And yet it was for his own knowledge of the British dialects that he had been sent on this journey, Gaius remembered now, and his mouth curled grimly. The elder Severus, his father, was Prefect of the Camp of the Second Adiutrix Legion at Deva, and had married the dark-haired daughter of a chieftain of the Silures in the early days of the conquest, when Rome still hoped to win the tribes by alliance. Gaius had spoken their dialect before he could lisp a word of nursery Latin.

There had been a time, of course, when an officer of an Imperial Legion, stationed in the fort of Deva, would not have troubled himself to phrase his demands in the language of a conquered country. Even now, Flavius Rufus, tribune of the second cohort, cared nothing for such niceties. But Macellius Severus senior, Prefectus Castrorum, was responsible only to Agricola, Governor of the Province of Britain, and it was the responsibility of Macellius Severus to keep peace and harmony between the people of the Province and the Legion that occupied, guarded and governed them.

Still licking their wounds a generation after the Killer Queen Boudicca had attempted her fruitless rebellion — and had been fiercely punished by the Legions - the people of Britannia were peaceful enough beneath the heavy impositions of tax and tribute. Levies of manpower they bore with less meekness, and here, on the outskirts of the Empire, resentment still smoldered, fostered adroitly by a few petty chiefs and malcontents. Into this hotbed of trouble, Flavius Rufus was sending a party of legionaries to supervise a levy of men being sent to work in the Imperial lead mines in the hills.

Imperial policy did not admit of a young officer being stationed in the Legion where his father held a post as important as Prefect. So Gaius now held the post of a military tribune in the Valeria Victrix legion at Glevum, and, despite his British half-blood, from his childhood he had undergone the severe discipline of a Roman soldier's son.

The elder Macellius had sought no favors for his only son as yet. But Gaius had taken a slight wound in the leg during a border skirmish; before he had quite recovered, a fever had sent him home to Deva, with permission to convalesce there before returning to his post. Recovered, he was restless in his father's house; the chance to go with the levy to the mines had seemed nothing but a pleasant holiday.

The trip had been largely uneventful; after the sullen levies had been marched away, Gaius, with a fortnight of his leave yet to run, had accepted the invitation of Clotinus Albus, seconded by the daughter's immodest glances, to stay for a few days and enjoy some hunting. Clotinus was adept at this too and - Gaius knew — had been pleased at the thought of offering hospitality to the son of a Roman official. Gaius had shrugged, enjoyed the hunting, which was excellent, and told Clotinus's daughter quite a number of pleasant lies, which was excellent too. Just the day before, he had killed a deer in these same woods, proving himself as adept with the light spear as these Britons with their own weapons; but now . . .

Sprawled in the filth of the pit, Gaius had poured out despairing curses on the timorous slave who had offered to show him a short cut from Clotinus's home to the Roman road that led straight, or so he said, to Deva; on his own folly in letting the simpleton drive the chariot; on the hare, or whatever it was that had dashed in front of him and frightened the horses; on the ill-trained animals themselves, and on the fool who had let them bolt; and on the off-guard moment in which he had lost his balance and been thrown, half-stunned, to the ground.

Stunned, yes, but if he had not been half out of his mind from the fall, he'd have had sense enough to stay where he'd fallen; even such a fool as the driver must sooner or later have regained control of his horses and come back for him. Even more than this he cursed his own folly in trying to find his own way through the forest and for leaving the path. He must have wandered a long way.

He must have been still dazed from the earlier fall, but he remembered with sickening clarity the sudden slip, the slither of the leaves and branches as the deadfall gave way, and then the fall, driving the stake through his arm with a force that had deprived him of consciousness for some minutes. The afternoon was getting on before he had recovered enough to take stock of his injuries. A second stake had torn the calf of his leg, ripping open his old wound; not a serious injury, but he had struck his ankle so hard that it had swollen to the size of his thigh; it was broken - or felt like it at least. Gaius, unwounded, was as agile as a cat and would have been out in moments; but now he was too weak and dazed to move.

He knew that if he didn't bleed to death before nightfall, the smell of blood would certainly attract wild beasts who would finish him off. He tried to stave off memories of his nurse's tales of worse things that scent might bring.

The damp chill was seeping through his whole body; he had shouted himself hoarse. Now, if he had to die he'd do it with Roman dignity. He huddled a fold of his blood-soaked cloak around his face, then, his heart pounding wildly, dragged himself upright; for he had heard voices.

Gaius put all his failing strength into a cry - half shriek, half howl; he was ashamed of the inhuman sound moments after it left his throat, and he struggled to add some more human plea, but nothing would come. He clutched at one of the stakes, but managed only to pull himself to his knee and lean against the dirt wall.

For a moment a last ray of sunlight blinded him. He blinked, and saw a girl's head framed in light above him.

"Great Mother!" she cried out in a clear voice. "How in the name of any god did you manage to fall down there? Did you not see the warning marks they put on the trees?"

Gaius could not manage a word; the young woman had addressed him in an exceptionally pure dialect that was not altogether familiar. Of course, they would be Ordovici tribesmen here. He had to think a moment to turn it into the Silure patois of his mother.

Before he could answer, a second feminine voice, this one richer and somehow stronger, exclaimed, "Lack-wit, we ought to leave him there for wolf bait!" Another face appeared beside the first one, so like it that for a moment he wondered if his vision was playing tricks on him.

"Here, grab my hand and I think, between the two of us, we can get you out," she said. "Eilan, help me!" A woman's hand, slender and white; reached down to him; Gaius put up his serviceable hand, but could not close it. "What's the matter? Are you hurt?" the girl asked more gently.

Before Gaius could answer, the other - Gaius could see nothing about her except that she was young - bent over to see for herself.

"Oh, I see now - Dieda, he is bleeding! Run and bring Cynric to pull him out of there."

Relief washed over Gaius so powerfully that consciousness nearly left him, and he slumped back down, whimpering as the movement jarred his wounds.

"You must not faint," came the clear voice above him. "Let my words be a rope to bind you to life, do you hear?"

"I hear you," he whispered. "Keep talking to me."

Perhaps it was because rescue was coming that he could allow himself to feel, but his wounds were beginning to hurt very badly. Gaius could hear the girl's voice above him, though the words no longer made sense to him. They rippled like the murmur of a stream, bearing his mind beyond the pain. The world darkened; Gaius realized that it was daylight and not his sight that had failed him only when he saw the flicker of torchlight on the trees.

The girl's face disappeared and he heard her call, "Father, there's a man caught in the old boar pit."

"We'll get him out then," a deeper voice replied. "Hmm . . ." Gaius sensed movement above him. "This seems a job for a stretcher. Cynric, you had better go down and see."

The next moment a young man had scrambled down the sides of the pit. He looked Gaius over and asked pleasantly, "What were you thinking about? It must take real wit to fall in there when everyone around knows it's been there thirty years!"

Mustering the scraps of his pride, Gaius started to say that if the fellow got him out he would be fitly rewarded, then was glad he had not spoken. As his eyes gradually adjusted to the torchlight, the young Roman realized that his rescuer was about his own age, not much over eighteen, but he was a young giant of a man. His fair hair curled loosely about his shoulders, and his face, still beardless, looked as gay and calm as if rescuing half-dead strangers was all in a day's work. He wore a tunic of checked cloth and trews of finely dyed leather; his embroidered wool cloak was fastened with a gold pin bearing a stylized raven done in red enamel. These were the clothes of a man of noble house, but not one of those who welcomed their conquerors and aped the manners of Rome.

Gaius said simply, "I'm a stranger here; I don't know your markings," in the language of the tribes.

"Well, don't worry about it; let's get you out and then we can talk about how you came to fall in." The young man slid his arm beneath Gaius's waist, supporting the young Roman as easily as if he were a child.

"We dug that pit for boars and bears and Romans," he remarked tranquilly. "Just bad luck you got caught in it." He looked up at the pit top and said, "Let down your mantle, Dieda; it will be easier than finding something for a stretcher. His own cloak's all stiff with blood."

When the mantle had been let down, the boy knotted it around Gaius's waist, then, fastening the other end about his own, he set his foot on the lowest of the stakes, and said, "Yell if I hurt you; I've hauled out bears like this, but they were dead and couldn't complain."

Gaius set his teeth and hung on, almost fainting with the pain when his swollen ankle struck a projecting root. Someone at the top leaned over and grabbed his hands and at last he struggled over the edge, then lay there just breathing for a moment before he had strength to open his eyes.

An older man was leaning over him. Gently he pulled away Gaius's fouled and blood-smeared cloak and whistled.

"Some god must love you, stranger; a few inches lower and that stake would have gone into your lungs. Cynric, girls, look at that," he went on. "Where the shoulder is still bleeding, the blood is dark and slow, so it is returning to the heart; if it were coming from the heart it would be bright red and spurting forth; and he would probably have bled to death before we found him."

The blond boy and the two girls bent over, one after the other, to see. Gaius lay silent. A dreadful suspicion had begun to steal over him. He had already abandoned all thought of identifying himself and asking them to take him to the house of Clotinus Albus in return for a substantial reward. Now he knew that only the old British tunic he had put on that morning for traveling had saved him. The offhand medical expertise of that speech told him that he was in the presence of a Druid. Then someone lifted him, and the world darkened and disappeared.

Gaius awakened to firelight and the face of a girl looking down at him. For a moment her features seemed to swim in a fiery halo. She was young and her face was fair, but the eyes were an odd shade between hazel and grey; wide-spaced under pale lashes. Her mouth was dimpled, but so grave that it looked older than the rest of her; her hair was as light as her lashes, almost colorless except where the firelight lay red across it. One of her hands moved across his face and he felt it cool; she had been bathing his face in water.

He looked for what seemed a long time, until her features were drawn forever on his memory. Then someone said, "That's enough, Eilan, I think he's awake," and the girl withdrew.

Eilan . . .He had heard the name before. Had it been in some dream? She was lovely.

Gains struggled to see, and realized that he was lying in a bench bed built into the wall. He looked about him, trying to understand where he was. Cynric, the young man who had drawn him out of the pit, and the old Druid whose name he did not know, were standing beside him. He was lying in a wood-framed roundhouse built in the old Celtic style, with smoothed logs radiating out from the high peak of the roof to the low wall. He had not been in such a house since he was a little child, when his mother had taken him to visit her kin.

The floor was thickly strewn with rushes; the wall of woven hazel withies was chinked and plastered with whitewashed clay, and the partitions between the bed boxes were made of wicker as well. A great flap of leather curtained the entrance instead of a door. To lie in this place made him feel very young, as if all the intervening years of Roman training had been stripped away.

His gaze moved slowly around the house and back to the girl. Her dress was of red-brown linen and she held a copper basin in her hand; she was tall, but younger than he had thought, her body still straight as a child's beneath the folds of her gown. Light from the central hearth behind her glowed in her fair hair.

The firelight also showed him the older man, the Druid. Gaius shifted his head a little and looked at him from beneath his lashes. The Druids were learned men among the Britons, but he had been told all his life that they were fanatics. To find himself in a Druid's house was like waking up in a wolf's lair, and Gaius did not mind admitting that he was afraid.

At least when he had heard the old man calmly discoursing on the circulation of the blood, a thing he had heard from his father's Greek physician was a teaching of the healer-priests of the highest rank, he had the sense to conceal his Roman identity.

Not that these folk made any secret of who they were. "We dug that pit for boars and bears and Romans," the young man had said quite casually. This should have told him at once that he was a good long way outside the little protected circle of Roman domination. Yet he was no more than a day's ride from the Legion post at Deva!

But if he was in the hands of the enemy, at least they were treating him well. The clothes the girl wore were well made; the copper basin she carried was beautifully worked — no doubt it had come from one of the southern markets.

Rushlights of reed dipped in tallow burned in hanging bowls; the couch where he lay was covered with linen, the straw mattress smelled of sweet herbs. It was heavenly warm after the chill of the pit. Then the old man who had directed his rescue came and sat down beside him, and for the first time Gaius got a good look at his rescuer.

He was a big and powerful man, with shoulders strong enough to throw down a bull. His face was rough-cast on his skull, as if carelessly chiseled out of stone, and his eyes were light grey and cold. His hair was liberally sprinkled with grey; Gaius thought he was around the age of his own father, about fifty.

"You had a remarkably narrow escape, young man," the Druid said. Gaius had the impression that lecturing came very naturally to him. "Next time keep your eyes open. I'll have a look at that shoulder in a minute. Eilan —" He beckoned to the girl and gave her instructions in a low voice.

She went away and Gaius asked, "To whom do I owe my life, Honored One?" He had never thought to show respect to a Druid. Gaius, like everyone else, had been brought up on Caesar's old horror stories of human sacrifice, and tales of the wars which had been fought to subdue the Druidic cult in Britain and in Gaul. Nowadays those who remained were pretty well controlled by Roman edicts, but they could be as much trouble as the Christians. The difference was that while the Christians spread dissension in the cities and refused to worship the Emperor, the Druids could incite even conquered peoples to bloody war.

Still, there was something about this man that commanded respect.

"My name is Bendeigid," the Druid said, but he did not question Gaius, and the young Roman remembered hearing his mother's people say that among the Celts a guest was still sacred, at least outside Roman lands. A man's worst enemy might claim food and shelter and depart unquestioned if he chose. Gaius breathed a little freer at the reprieve; this was one place it might be safer - and wiser — to claim hospitality as a guest than to exact it as the right of a conqueror.

The girl Eilan came into the alcove again, carrying a small chest of oakwood bound with iron, and a drinking horn. She said timidly, "I hope this is the right one."

Her father nodded to her brusquely, took the chest, and gestured to her to give the horn to Gaius. He reached for it and found to his surprise that his fingers had not the strength to close.

The Druid said, "Drink that," with the unmistakable manner of a man who is accustomed to giving orders and to having them obeyed. He added after a minute, "You'll need it by the time we get through with you." He sounded pleasant enough; but Gaius had begun to be frightened.

Bendeigid gestured to the girl and she came back to Gaius's bedside.

She smiled, tasted a few drops in the traditional gesture of hospitality, then held the horn to his lips. Gaius tried to raise himself a little but his muscles would not obey him. With a compassionate cry, Eilan lifted his head in the curve of her arm so that he could drink.

The young Roman sipped at the cup; it was strong mead, to which some bitter, obviously medicinal spice had been added.

"You had almost won through to the Land of Youth, stranger, but you will not die," she murmured. "I saw you in a dream, but you were older - and with a little boy by your side."

He looked up at her, already too deliciously drowsy to find that disturbing. Young as she was, lying against her breast was like being back in his mother's arms. Now, when he was in pain, he could almost remember her, and his eyes stung with tears. He was vaguely aware when the old Druid cut away his tunic and the old Druid and the young man Cynric washed his wounds with something that stung - but not any worse than the stuff old Manlius had put on his leg when he hurt it before. They smeared his leg with something sticky and stinging, and bound it tightly with strips of linen. Then they moved the swollen ankle, and he watched without much interest as somebody said, "Nothing much wrong here — not even broken."

But he snapped out of the dreamy daze when Cynric said, "Brace yourself, youngster; that stake was filthy, but I think we can save the arm, if we burn it out."

"Eilan," the old man commanded curtly, "get out of here; this is nothing for a young girl to see."

"I'll hold him, Eilan," Cynric said. "You can go."

"I will stay, Father. Maybe I can help." Her hand closed over Gaius's, and the old man growled, "Do as you like, then, but don't scream or faint."

The next minute Gaius felt strong hands - Cynric's? — holding him flat and hard. Eilan's hand was still twined in his, but he felt it quiver a little; he turned his head away, closing his eyes and grinding his teeth lest some shameful cry should escape him. He smelled the approach of the heated iron, and then a frightful agony ripped through his whole body.

A scream contorted his lips, he felt it escape as a gagging grunt; then the rough touch released him and he felt only the girl's soft hands. When he could open his eyes, he saw the Druid looking down at him, a bleak smile tight around the greying beard. Cynric, who was still bent over him, was very white; Gaius had seen that look on youngsters in his own command after their first battle.

"Well, you're certainly no coward, lad," the youth said in a choked voice.

"Thanks," Gaius said absurdly. And fainted.

Two

When Gaius came to himself again, feeling as if he had been unconscious for a long time, the rushlights had burned down. Only a little light came from the coals on the hearth, and by it he could just make out the girl Eilan seated beside him nearly asleep. He felt tired, and his arm throbbed and he was thirsty. He could hear women's voices not far away. His shoulder was done up in thick wrappings of linen — he felt as if he had been swaddled like a newborn babe. The injured shoulder was slick with some greasy salve and the linen smelled of fat and balsam.

The girl sat silent beside him on a little three-legged stool, as pale and slender as a young birch, her hair combed away from her temples, waving a little; it was too fine in texture to lie perfectly flat. She had a gilt chain around her neck with some sort of amulet. These Briton girls matured late, Gaius knew; she might be as old as fifteen. She was hardly a woman, but just as certainly not a child.

There was a clatter as if someone had dropped a pail and a young voice yelled, "Then you can go and milk them yourself if you've a mind!"

"And what's to do with the byre-woman?" a woman's voice asked sharply.

"Oh, wailing and weeping like the banshee because those Roman butchers came and marched her man off with the levies, and she left with three babes," said the first voice, "and now my Rhodri has gone off after them."

"The curse of Tanarus on all Romans —" began a voice Gaius recognized as Cynric's, but the older woman's voice cut him short.

"Hush now. Mairi, put the dishes on the table, don't stand here shouting at the boys. I'll go and speak with the poor woman - tell her she can bring the little ones here to the house - but someone must milk the cows this night, even if the Romans carry off every man in Britain."

"You are good, Foster Mother," Cynric said, and the voices subsided into a hum again. The girl looked toward Gaius and rose from her stool.

"Oh, you are awake," she said. "Are you hungry?"

"I could devour a horse and chariot and chase the driver halfway to Venta," Gaius said gravely, and she stared a moment before her eyes widened and she giggled.

"I'll go and see if there is a horse and chariot in the cookhouse," she said, laughing, and then the light behind her broadened and a lady stood in the doorway. For a moment he was astonished at the brightness; for there was sunlight in the room.

"What is it, the next day?" he blurted without thinking, and the lady laughed, turned aside and drew the horsehide curtain wide, catching it on a hook and extinguishing the guttering rushlight in one easy motion.

"Eilan would not let us disturb you even to eat," she said. "She insisted that rest would do you more good than food. I suppose she was right; but you must be very hungry now. I am sorry I was not here to welcome you to our house; I was out attending to a sick woman in one of our clanholds. I hope Eilan has been looking after you properly."

"Oh, very," said Gaius. He blinked, for something in her manner had reminded him painfully of his mother.

The lady looked down at him. She was beautiful, this Briton woman, and so like the girl that the relationship was obvious, even before the girl said, "Mother -" and stopped, too shy to continue. The woman, like the girl, had fair hair and dark, hazel-grey eyes. She looked as if she had been working with her maids, for there was a smear of flour on her fine woolen tunic, but the shift that showed beneath it was white, finer linen than he had yet seen in Britain, edged with embroidery. Her shoes were a good dyed leather, and fine fibulae of spiraled gold fastened the gown.

"I hope that you are feeling better," she said graciously.

Gaius raised himself on his good arm. "Much better, lady," he said, "and eternally grateful to you and yours."

She made a little gesture of dismissal. "Do you come from Deva?"

"I have been visiting near there," he answered. The Latin flavor of his speech would be explained if she thought he came from a Roman town.

"Since you are awake, I'll send Cynric to help you bathe and dress."

"It will be good to wash," said Gaius, pulling up the blanket as he realized that he was naked except for his bandaging.

The woman followed his gaze and said, "He'll find you some clothes; they may be too large for you, but they'll do for the moment. If you'd rather lie here and rest, you can; but you're welcome to join us if you feel able."

Gaius thought for a moment. Every muscle in his body felt as if he had been beaten with cudgels; on the other hand, he could not help feeling curious about this household, and he must not appear to scorn their society. He had believed that the Britons who had not allied with Rome were mostly savages, but there was nothing primitive about this establishment.

"I will join you with pleasure," he said, and rubbed a hand across his face, dismayed at the untidy stubble. "But I would like to wash - and perhaps shave."

"I don't think you should put yourself to the trouble of shaving — certainly not for us," she said, "But Cynric will help you to wash. Eilan, find your brother and tell him he's needed."

The girl slipped away. The lady turned to follow, then looked at him, seeing him more clearly in the light of the recessed cubicle. Her eyes softened from a smile of courtesy to one that reminded him of the way his own mother had looked at him, long ago. "Why," she said, "you're nothing but a boy."

For a moment Gaius felt stung by the words — he had done a

" man's work for three years - but before he could frame any

courteous answer, a mocking young voice said, "Yes, and if he is a

boy, Stepmother, I am a babe in long clothes. Well, stumble-foot,

are you ready to go tumbling in some more bear pits?"

Cynric came through the door. Once more Gaius was struck by how tall he was, but except for his great height he too was still a youth; though he would have made two of Gaius. He laughed. "Well," he said, "you look a little less ready to be carted away by the old man who kills off fools and drunks. Let me look at your leg and we'll see if you're fit to set your foot to the ground." For all his size, his hands were gentle as he examined the hurt leg, and when he was finished he laughed again.

"We should all have legs so fit to walk! It's mostly a bad bump; what did you do, knock it on a stake? I thought so. Anyone less lucky would have broken it in three places and gone limping for life; but I think you'll be all right. The shoulder's another thing; you won't be fit to travel for seven days or so."

Gaius struggled upright. "I must," he said. "I must be in Deva in four days." His leave would be ended . . .

"I tell you, if you're in Deva in four days, your friends will bury you there," said Cynric. "Even I know that much. Oh, by the way" - he took on a deliberate stance and repeated as if reciting a lesson - "Bendeigid sends his greetings to the guest in his house, and bids him recover as best he may; he regrets that necessity keeps him absent this day and night, but he will rejoice to see you on his return." He added, "It would take a braver man than I am to face him and tell him you wouldn't accept his hospitality."

"Your father is most kind," Gaius replied.

He might as well rest. There was nothing he could do. He could hardly mention Clotinus. What happened next all depended on that fool who drove the chariot; if he went back and dutifully reported that the Prefect's son had been thrown and maybe killed, they'd already be combing the woods for his body. On the other hand, if the halfwit lied, or took this opportunity to run away to some village not under Roman rule — and there were plenty of them, even this close to Deva — well, it was anyone's guess. He might not be missed until Macellius Severus began asking questions about his son.

Cynric was bending over a chest at the foot of the bed; he drew out a shirt and surveyed it with a mixture of amusement and dismay. "Those rags you were wearing are only fit to scare crows," he said. "I'll set the girls to clean and mend them, if it can be done; they haven't much else to do in this weather. But you'd look like a maid in a long gown in this." He flung it down. "I'll go and borrow something nearer your size."

He went away, and Gaius fumbled in the remnants of clothing that lay folded beside the bed for the purse on the leather belt they had cut off him. Everything was untouched as far as he could make out. A few of the tin squares that still passed current for coin outside the Roman towns, a clasp, a folding knife, one or two small rings and a few other trinkets he had not wanted to wear hunting — ah yes, here it was. Much good it had done him! He glanced briefly at the scrap of parchment with the Prefect's seal; his safe-conduct would be no good to him here, if it did not in fact endanger him; but when he left here, he would need it to travel.

Swiftly he fumbled it back into the pouch. Had they seen the signet ring? He started to slip it off his finger and put it into the purse; but then Cynric, some clothes over his arm, came back into the room. Gaius felt almost guilty; it looked as if he was examining his possessions to see if anything had been stolen.

He said, "I think the seal of the ring became loosened when I fell," and worked the green stone back and forth a little. "I was afraid it might come out if I wore it."

"Roman work," said Cynric, looking at it. "What does it say?"

It bore only his initials and the arms of the Legion but he was proud of the ring, for Macellius had sent to Londinium and ordered it from a seal-cutter when he took up his commission; but Gaius said, "I don't know; it was a gift."

"The design is Roman," said Cynric, scowling. "The Romans have strewn their rubbish from here to Caledonia." He added scornfully, "There's no telling whence it came."

Something in Cynric's manner told Gaius he stood in more deadly danger now than in the pit. The Druid himself, Bendeigid, would never violate hospitality; he knew that from tales his mother and his nurse had told him. But there was no telling what this young hothead would do.

On an impulse, he took one of the smaller rings from his pouch.

"My life I owe to you and to your father," he said. "Will you accept this as a gift from me? It is not costly, but it may serve to remind you of a good deed done."

Cynric took the ring from his hand; it was too small for any but his smallest finger. "Cynric, son of Bendeigid the Druid, thanks you, stranger," he said. "I know no name by which I may return thanks . . ."

It was about as broad a hint as good manners permitted, and Gaius could not in courtesy ignore it. He would have given the name of his mother's brother; but the name of the Silure chieftain who had given his sister to a Roman might have made its way into even this corner of Britain. A small breach of truth was better than a major one of manners.

"My mother called me Gawen," he said finally. This much at least was true, for Gaius, his Roman name, had been foreign to her tongue. "I was born in Venta Silurum, to the south, of no lineage you would know."

Cynric thought about this for a moment, twisting the ring on his little finger. Then a curious light of comprehension dawned in his face. He said, gazing intently at Gaius, "Do ravens fly at midnight?"

Gaius was no less astonished by the question than by Cynric's manner. For a moment he wondered if the young man were simple; then he answered carelessly, "I'm afraid you have the better of me in woodcraft; I never knew any that did."

He glanced down at Cynric's hands, saw the fingers were enlaced in a peculiar manner, and began to understand. This must be the sign of one of the many secret societies, mostly religious like the cults of Mithras or the Nazarene. Were these people Christians? No, their sign was a fish or some such, not a raven.

Well, nothing could interest him less, and his expression must have showed it. The young Briton's face changed slightly, and he said hastily, "I see I have made a mistake —" and turned away. "Here, I think these will fit you; I borrowed them from my sister Mairi, they're her husband's. Come, I'll help you to the bathhouse and get father's razor for you if you want to shave - though you're old enough, I would think, to grow a beard. Careful - don't put all your weight on that foot or you'll fall on the floor."

Bathed, shaved and, with Cynric's help, dressed in a clean tunic and the loose breeches the Britons wore, Gaius felt able to get up and hobble. His arm throbbed and burned, and his leg ached in several places, but he could have been much worse, and he knew that his muscles would stiffen if he remained in bed. Even so, he leaned gratefully on Cynric's arm as the taller boy guided his steps across the yard to the long feasting hall.

A table of hewn boards ran down the center, with heavy benches to either side. Warmth was provided by a hearth at either end of the hall. Near these a mixed number of men and women and even a few children were assembling. Heavily bearded men in roughly woven smocks talked to one another in a dialect so crude Gaius could not understand a word.

Although his tutor had taught him that the Latin familia originally meant all who shared living quarters: master, children, freedmen, and slaves, the Romans now kept their serving folk apart from the family. Cynric mistook his look of mild distaste for weakness, and hastened to lead him to a cushioned seat at the upper end of the long room.

Here, a little apart from the mixed crew at the lower end of the table, the lady of the house was seated on a wide chair. Near by, another seat, covered with a bearskin, was evidently reserved for the master. Other wide settles and benches were occupied by several young men and women whose finer garments and well-bred manners proclaimed them children or fosterlings of the household, or perhaps upper servants. The lady of the house nodded at the boys but did not interrupt her conversation with an old man seated near the hearth, tall and gaunt as an elderly ghost, with grey hair curled and cut in almost foppish fashion. His beard was grey, too, and elaborately curled. Green eyes twinkled in the old man's face; his long tunic was of snowy white, embroidered lavishly, and the small wire-strung harp by his side was trimmed and ornamented with gold.

A bard! But that was not so surprising in a Druid's hall. It needed only a soothsayer to have all of the three classes of Druid that Caesar had described represented here. But a diviner might have seen through the young Roman's disguise. As it was, the old bard favored Gaius with a long glance that made the skin prickle along his backbone before the old man turned to his hostess again.

Cynric said in an undertone, "You know my stepmother Rheis; this is the bard Ardanos, I call him grandfather, for he is my foster mother's father; I am an orphan."

This silenced Gaius completely, for he had heard of Ardanos in the headquarters of the Legion. He was believed to be a powerful Druid, perhaps the chief of those who remained in the British Isles. Although at first glance Ardanos looked like any other harper about to play, his every gesture compelled the eye. Not for the first time, Gaius wondered how he would escape with a whole skin.

He was glad to drop on to a bench near the hearth and be ignored. Although it was still bright outside, he felt a chill, and welcomed the heat of the fire. It had been a long time since he had needed to remember the ways of his mother's kin. He hoped he would not make a mistake that would betray him.

Cynric went on, "My sister Eilan you know; beside her is my mother's sister Dieda." Eilan was sitting near Rheis. Cynric laughed at Gaius's astonishment as next to Eilan he saw another girl in green linen, leaning against the back of her chair and listening to the old bard. For just a moment she seemed as like to Eilan as one oak leaf to another; then he saw that the girl Cynric had named Dieda was a little older, and that she had blue eyes, where Eilan's were almost grey. Vaguely he remembered seeing two faces looking down at him from the edge of the boar pit, but he had thought that delirium.

"There are really two of them; they are more alike than twins, are they not?"

It was true, but Gaius was suddenly certain that the sureness with which he had recognized Eilan would always remain with him. All his life he would be one of the few who could tell the two women apart as if by instinct. A fragment of memory bound up with pain and fire came to him - Eilan had dreamed about him.

And now that he considered them, he could see that they were unlike in many small ways too; Dieda was a little taller, and her hair lay flat and smooth against her forehead while Eilan's escaped from its binding in a tiny halo of curls. Dieda's face was smooth and pale and perfect, she looked solemn; Eilan looked rosy, as if her face had caught the sunlight and held it there.

They seemed very different to him, and their voices were altogether so. Dieda said something carelessly courteous; her voice was rich and musical, without Eilan's shyness or her laughter.

"So you are the simpleton who goes about tumbling into boar pits?" Dieda said, gravely. "From what Cynric told me I expected to see some moon-struck lout, but you seem reasonably civilized."

Gaius nodded noncommittally; it was strange to see so young a girl with so much cool reserve. He had warmed at once to Eilan, but somehow, though there seemed no reason she should care, he fancied that this one did not like him.

Cynric nodded and turned to a young woman who had passed by with a jug of milk. "Mairi, our guest is named Gawen, if you have not turned dairy woman in such earnest that you cannot even greet him." The older woman bowed her head in polite acknowledgment, but did not reply. As she turned he could see that she was not plump, but exceedingly pregnant. She looked as if she had been crying.

"And that's all of us, except for my baby sister Senara," Cynric said. This was a little girl of six or seven, with fair hair like Eilan's. She looked out shyly from behind Mairi's skirt and then grew bolder, saying, "Eilan did not come to bed with me at all; Mother said she sat by you all night long."

"Then I am honored by her kindness," Gaius said, laughing, "but I have little success with women if the prettiest of them pays me no heed. Why were you not anxious to watch by me, little one?"

She was a round-faced, rosy little thing, and reminded him of his own sister, who had not long survived his mother's death three years ago. He drew the child to him with his good arm and she crept up on the seat beside him where she rested contentedly. Later she insisted on sharing his plate when the older girls, Mairi and Dieda, brought them food, and Gaius laughed and humored her.

Cynric and Dieda were talking together in low tones. Gaius tried to deal with his food, but his bandaged arm made it difficult. Eilan saw the trouble he was having and came and sat on his other side. With a little sharp knife she wore at her belt, she unobtrusively cut up his food into morsels that he could manage, and told the child, in a quiet voice that did not carry beyond their own ears, not to bother their guest. That done, Eilan's shyness returned. She went to the fireplace without speaking, and Gaius was content to watch her.

One of the servants brought a child about a year old to Mairi, and the young woman, without the slightest self-consciousness, unfastened her dress and sat nursing it, chatting with Cynric. She glanced at Gaius with innocent curiosity, saying, "Now I can see why you sent to borrow my husband's other tunic and breeches. He has gone off to —" She broke off, frowning. "I did not think he would mind loaning his gear to a guest, though he may have a word to say to me if he finds I gave his dry clothes away while he was shivering in the forest. Tell me, Gawen, are all the Silures as short as you, like one of the little people, or did some Roman creep into your grandmother's bed one night?"

Any answer Gaius might have made was drowned in laughter all along the table. Gaius remembered that the Britons were given to grosser jesting than a Roman of good breeding would think tasteful. It was true that the Silures were small for Britons, dark and fine-boned compared to the big, fair-skinned men of the Belgic tribes. Cynric and Eilan and Dieda and Rheis were of that type. But Gaius's few memories of his uncle who ruled the Silures were of a man of power despite his lack of height, a man quick to fury or laughter, with tattooed dragons coiling up his arms.

An answer came to him which he would not have dared to make in Roman company, but which might serve here. "As to that, I cannot say, Mistress Mairi, but they fit me well enough — and you were not unwilling I should fill them."

Cynric threw back his head with a great bass roar of laughter, taken up by all the others. Even the quiet Rheis smiled a little, but quickly sobered, as if she knew something Mairi did not. For a moment it seemed as if she were forcing herself to congeniality. She turned to Ardanos.

"Father, shall we have some music?"

Ardanos picked up the harp and looked sharply at Gaius. The younger man had a sudden conviction that the old Druid knew perfectly well what - and perhaps who - he was. But how could he? Gaius was dark-haired like his father, but the Silures, like some of the other races of the West and South, were also known for their dark and curly hair. He was almost sure he had never set eyes on the old man before. He told himself he was imagining things -probably that stare of supposed recognition had been only shortsightedness.

The old Druid picked up the harp, struck a chord or two, then put it aside. "I'm in no mood for singing," he said, looking at one of the fair-haired girls. "Dieda, my child, will you sing for us?"

Eilan dimpled and said, "I am always at your service, Grandfather, but you don't really want to hear me sing, do you?"

Ardanos laughed in chagrin. "Ah, I've done it again, Eilan, it is you? I swear you and Dieda always try to confuse me. As if anyone could tell you apart until you open your mouths!"

Rheis said gently, "I cannot see they are as much alike as that, Father. Of course, one is my sister and one my daughter, but to me they seem hardly alike at all. Are you sure it is not the failing of your eyesight?"

"No, I always confuse them until one of them begins to sing," protested the Druid. "No one could mistake one for the other then."

Eilan said, "You need not make a face like a sour crab apple, Grandfather, I have not been apprenticed as a bard!" Then they fell silent as, unaccompanied, Dieda began to sing:

"A bird in the air told a riddle to me;

A fish is a bird that swims in the sea,

A bird is a fish that swims in the air."

Under cover of the song, Rheis beckoned Mairi to her, and said, "Have the Romans taken anyone but the byre-woman's man?"

"Not that I know of, Mother, but Rhodri went off after them before I could ask." Mairi said, shaking her head. "He said that most of the other levies were made to the north."

"That fat hog Caradac! Or I should say Clotinus, as the Romans call him!" Cynric burst out. "If Old Bedbugs would stand with us the Romans would never dare send their Legions into this part of the country - but as long as everyone goes either over to the Romans or to the Caledonians —"

"Be still!" Dieda said sharply, breaking off her song. "You'll wind up having to go north yourself—"

Rheis said gently, "Hush, children, these family matters will not interest our guest." But Gaius could tell that what she meant was, "It isn't safe to talk like this with a stranger in the house."

Ardanos said calmly, "This part of the country is quieter than it has been for years. The Romans think us tamed, fit only to be milked for taxes. But the best of their troops are off trying to conquer the Novantae - and as a result there is less order here."

"Such order as that we could well spare," Cynric said sharply, but Ardanos glared at him and he subsided.

Gaius leaned a little forward into the firelight. He suspected that he would almost certainly do better to remain silent, but he was curious.

"I was in Deva lately," he said slowly. "There was talk there that the Emperor may call Agricola back from Alba despite his victories. They say there is no profit in spending men and supplies to hold such a barren land."

"We could hardly be so lucky," Dieda said, and laughed in contempt. "The Romans may indeed vomit up what they have eaten to make room in their bellies for more; but no Roman ever ceded an inch of conquered land!"

Gaius opened his mouth; then thought better of it. Rheis said, "Is Agricola so formidable? Could he really conquer Britannia all the way to the northern sea?"

Ardanos grimaced. "The gossip in Deva may have some truth in it; between the wolves and the wild men I doubt that even Roman tax farmers could squeeze out much profit there."

Dieda looked at Gaius with a sudden malice. "You who have lived among Romans," she said, "perhaps you can tell us why they are carrying off our men and what will happen to them?"

"The provincial senators pay their taxes with the men of the levy. I suppose they will take them to the lead mines in the Mendip hills," he said reluctantly, "and I know not what will befall them there."

But he did know. The whip and poor feeding would be used to break their spirit, and the gelder's knife to unman any who continued to resist. Those who survived the march would be set to work in the mines as long as they lived. A flicker of triumph in Dieda's eyes told him she had guessed he knew more than he would say. He winced as Mairi began to weep. He had never met - or ever thought he would — anyone who could be subject to the levies.

"Can't something be done?" she cried.

"Not this year," the old man answered.

"Not much anyone can do about it," Gaius said defensively, "but you can't deny that the mines have enriched all Britain —"

"We can live without such enrichment," Cynric said wrathfully. "Rome enriches at the top, and enslaves at the bottom."

"It is not only Romans who have become wealthy —" Gaius began.

"You mean traitors like Clotinus?"

Rheis leaned forward as if to terminate a conversation that had become awkward, but Cynric would not be stopped.

"You who have lived among Romans," Cynric said angrily, "do you know how Clotinus the White-Washed made his fortune? He guided the Legions to Mona, or are you too much a Roman to remember that once there was a holy place there - the Isle of Women - the holiest place in Britain perhaps before Paulinus came?"

"I knew only that there was a sanctuary," Gaius said neutrally, his neck prickling again with that sense of danger. For the Romans, the destruction of Mona had been overshadowed by the catastrophe of the Iceni rebellion, but he knew better than to discuss Mona in the house of a Druid, especially since Agricola had mopped up whatever resistance might have been left there only last year.

"Here sits a bard at our own fireside," said Cynric, "who can sing of the women of Mona so that your heart will crack!"

Almost simultaneously the Druid said, "Not tonight, lad," and the lady of the house leaned forward. "Not at my table; it is not a story to be told while guests are trying to eat their dinner," she said emphatically.

The suggestion, thought Gaius, was unpopular - or sufficiently political to make unsafe conversation. But he agreed with the bard's sentiments; he had no wish to hear any story of Roman atrocities right now.

Cynric looked sullen for a moment, then said to Gaius in an undertone, "I will tell you later then. My foster mother may well be right; it is not a tale to be told at the dinner table, nor before children."

"We would do better," said Rheis, "to talk about our preparations for the feast of Beltane," and Mairi and the girls, as if at a signal, rose from the table. Cynric offered his arm to Gaius, and helped him back to his bed. The young Roman was a good deal

more weary than he had realized; every muscle in his body ached, and though he was resolved not to sleep before he had thoroughly thought all this through, he soon found himself drifting off.

In the next few days, Gaius's injured shoulder swelled, which kept him abed in considerable pain - but Eilan, who nursed him devotedly, said that this discomfort was nothing to the illness that could have come from such a dirty stake.

The only part of the day that was tolerable was when, two or three times a day, Eilan - who seemed to have appointed herself his nurse - brought him his meals and fed him, since he could hardly hold a spoon, let alone cut up meat. He had not been so close to any woman since his mother had died, and had never quite realized how much he had missed that closeness. Whether it was because she was female or because she was of his mother's people, or perhaps from some sympathy of spirit that went beyond either, he found himself truly able to relax with her. In the long hours between her appearances, he had nothing else to think about, and each day, it seemed, he looked forward to seeing her more.

One morning Cynric and Rheis suggested that it would do him good to get out into the sunshine for a little and try to walk. He hobbled painfully out into the courtyard, where little Senara found him, prattling that she and Eilan were going to the meadow to pick flowers and make garlands for the Beltane festival the next day.

Under normal circumstances the idea of going along with a couple of girls would not have attracted Gaius very much; but after his last few days in bed, he would have welcomed a trip to the cowshed to watch Mairi - or even the byre-woman - milk the cows. In fact it seemed more like a picnic; for Cynric and Dieda joined them. The younger girls bullied Cynric as if he were truly their brother, and gave him their shawls and the lunch basket to carry.

Senara escorted Gaius; he leaned harder on her than he really wanted to, and told himself that he was humoring the child. Cynric seemed to hover over Dieda in something other than a brotherly way, talking in low tones. Watching them, Gaius wondered if they were pledged to each other; he did not know enough of this tribe's customs to tell, but he knew better than to bother them.

They laid the contents of the lunch basket out on the grass; there was fresh baked bread and cold sliced roast meat, and apples —rather withered and brown - the last, the girls said, of the winter store.

"Let me go find some berries." Senara jumped to her feet, looking around her, and Eilan laughed.

"Silly, it's springtime. Do you think our guest is a goat you can feed on flowers?"

Gaius did not care what they ate; he was exhausted.

There was a flask of pressed fruit juice and another of fresh brewed country beer. The younger girls would not drink it, saying it was too sour; but Gaius found it refreshing. There were sweet cakes too, which Dieda had made herself. She and Cynric shared a drinking horn and left Gaius to the company of the other girls.

When they had all eaten as much as they could hold, Senara filled a bowl with clear water from a spring in the corner of the meadow and told Eilan to see if she could see the face of her sweetheart in it.

"That is an old superstition," Eilan said, "and I have no sweetheart."

"I have," Cynric said, seizing the bowl and staring into it. "Will the water show me your face, Dieda?" She came and looked over his shoulder. "It is all nonsense," she said. Gaius thought she looked prettier when she blushed.

"Did you look in the water, Eilan?" asked Senara, tugging at her sleeve.

Eilan said, "I think it is blasphemous to try to compel the Goddess to speak that way! What would Lhiannon say?"

"Does anyone here care?" Dieda asked with a strange hard little smile. "We all know she says nothing unless it is given her by the priests."

"Your father cares," Cynric said soberly.

"True, he does," Dieda said, "and so I suppose you must care too."

Senara turned to her. "Tell me what you saw in the water, Dieda," she demanded shrilly.

"Me," said Cynric, "or at least I hope so."

"You would really be our brother, then," Senara smiled at him.

"Why do you think I want to marry her?" Cynric grinned. "But we have yet to speak to your father."

"Do you think he will oppose it?" Dieda seemed suddenly anxious, and it occurred to Gaius that being the Arch-Druid's daughter might be even more constricting than being a Prefect's son. "Surely if he had pledged me elsewhere, he would have told me of it before now!"

"And who will you marry, Eilan?" Senara asked. Gaius leaned forward, his attention abruptly focusing.

"I had not thought of it," Eilan said, coloring. "Sometimes it seems to me that I hear the Goddess - perhaps I should enter the Forest House as one of the maidens of the Oracle."

"Rather you than me," Dieda said. "I would never grudge you that life."

"Ugh!" Senara shook her head. "Would you really want to live all alone?"

"That would be a shameful waste." Gaius said. "Is there no man you wish to marry?"

Eilan looked up at him and was silent a moment before speaking, then she said slowly, "None to whom my parents would be likely to give me. And life in the Forest House can be very rewarding. The holy women learn all manner of wisdom and the healing arts."

So, Gaius thought, she would like to be a healer-priestess. As he had said to Senara, he thought that would be a great waste of one who brought such beauty to the world. Eilan was quite different from everything he had heard of British girls, whom he had thought were like Clotinus's daughter. His father had sometimes spoken of pledging him in marriage to the daughter of an old friend, a high official in Londinium, but he had never seen the girl.

Now it occurred to him that it might be more useful for him to marry someone like Eilan. After all, his own mother had been a British tribeswoman. He looked at Eilan so long that she grew uneasy.

"Is there a spot on my face?" she asked. "We should get started on our festival garlands." Suddenly she jumped up and started across the meadow, which was liberally starred with blue, purple and yellow flowers. "No, not the bluebells," she said to Senara, who had followed her. "They will fade far too soon."

"Show me which ones I should use, then," Senara demanded. "I like these purple orchids - last year I saw the priestesses wearing them."

"I think their stems are too stiff to braid, but I will try," Eilan said, taking the handful of flowers from Senara. "No. I cannot do it; no doubt Lhiannon's maidens know some skill I do not," Eilan declared. "Let's try the primroses."

"They are as common as weeds," Senara complained, and Eilan frowned.

"What happens at the festival?" Gaius asked to distract her.

"They drive the cattle between the fires, and Lhiannon calls down the Goddess to deliver the Oracles," Eilan declared, her hands full of flowers.

"And lovers meet at the fires," said Cynric, looking at Dieda, "And pledged couples make known their vows. Here, Senara, try these."

"They are the ones I was trying to weave," Eilan complained, "but their stems are too stiff. Dieda, will those blossoms work?"

The older girl was kneeling before a hawthorn bush in full, starry bloom. At the question she turned and pricked her finger on a thorn. Cynric came over to her and kissed it, and she blushed and asked quickly, "Shall I make you a wreath, Cynric?"

"As you wish." Then a raven cawed from somewhere in the trees and his face changed. "What am I saying? I should not be thinking of garlands now."

Gaius saw her open her mouth as if to ask Cynric why not, then stop, and wondered if it was because he was a stranger. She cast the blossoms away, and began to pick up the platters from which they had eaten. Eilan and Senara had finished their garlands.

"Rheis will be very cross if we forget to carry back any of these plates," Dieda pointed out. "And you girls had better finish these cakes."

Senara took one of the cakes and broke it in half, handing the remainder to Gaius.

"Now we have shared a single cake, you are my hearth-guest," she said. "Almost my brother."

"Don't be so silly, Senara," Eilan said reprovingly. "Gawen, don't let her pester you."

"Oh, let her alone," Gaius said, "she isn't bothering me." He thought again of his own dead sister, and wondered what his life would have been like had she lived. As he rose to his feet, he stumbled a little and Eilan came to take his arm, handing her garlands to Dieda.

"I'm afraid we have tired you, Gawen," she said. "Here, lean on me. Careful, don't knock your arm on anything," she warned, guiding him away from a tree.

"Why, Eilan, you are a healer-priestess already," Cynric said. "Gawen, you can lean on me if you like. Of course, Eilan's much prettier than I am, so perhaps I should help Dieda," he said, his face brightening, and he took Dieda's arm as they started back

along the path. "I think you had better go straight back to bed instead of getting up for supper, Gawen. Eilan will bring it to you. I worked too hard on that arm to have you undo all my labor."

Three

The dwelling of the Priestess of the Oracle was square, like a shrine, surrounded by a roofed portico and set a little apart from the other buildings within Vernemeton's walls. Although folk referred to the whole enclosure as the Forest House, in truth it was an entire community whose clustered buildings were connected by covered walkways. Gardens and courtyards lay between them so that the whole was like a maze. Only the dwelling of the High Priestess was set apart from the others, just as only she was surrounded by the kind of absolute simplicity that is harder to maintain than the most rigid ritual.

When the Arch-Druid Ardanos arrived, he was ushered into her presence at once by her attendant priestess, a tall dark-haired women called Caillean. She was clothed much like the High Priestess in a robe of dark blue linen, but Lhiannon's arm rings and the' torque at her throat were of pure gold, while those of her attendant were of silver.

"You may go, child," Lhiannon told Caillean.

Ardanos waited until the striped door-curtain had closed behind her, then smiled. "She is no longer a child, Lhiannon. Many winters have passed since you came here with her to the Forest House."

"True, I lose track of the years," Lhiannon replied.

She was, the Druid Ardanos reflected dispassionately, an exceptionally beautiful woman still. He had known her for many years and was probably the nearest thing to a friend of her own generation yet living. When he had been younger, this had cost him many sleepless nights; he was now elderly and seldom even remembered how she had disturbed his peace.

All the priestesses of the Forest House at Vernemeton, the Most Sacred Grove, were chosen as much for their beauty as for any

other attribute. It always surprised him. He could understand that a god might wish to be served by beautiful women, especially if he were some worthless Roman deity, but it did not accord with what he knew of women that a goddess should wish her servitors to be too beautiful.

His silence was not in the least constrained by the presence of the great churl Huw, who bore a cudgel and was stationed at the door, and who would immediately dash out the brains of any man -even the Arch-Druid himself - who made an offensive move or spoke a disrespectful word to the Priestess. Ardanos, of course, had no such intention; Huw's presence simply assured Lhiannon's safety and allowed her a freedom in entertaining visitors not permitted to others.

Ardanos knew that he did not look sufficiently venerable to grace the office of Arch-Druid, nor was he the Merlin of Britain reborn. But he consoled himself with the thought that Lhiannon no longer looked much like the living incarnation and prophetess of the Holy Goddess of Wisdom and Inspiration either. She was gracious and gentle and her face was refined by austerity, but for the rest she was just an aging woman, though her hair was so fair it was all but impossible to detect the graying strands he knew must be there. Her dark blue sacramental gown fell in stiff and unbecoming folds. The straight shoulders had begun to droop a little with fatigue. Ardanos felt his own age the more in beholding such clear signs of hers.

In recent years, in deference to her age, Lhiannon had begun to wear a headcloth, as most matrons and older women did, except when her hair was unbound for ritual. And yet, Ardanos reflected, for twenty years — and he had known her for most of them - this woman's face and form had been central to their faith, and through her lips had come, if not the literal word of the gods, then that word as it was interpreted by the priests of the Oracle.

And so perhaps there was something of divinity in the aging woman's face after all, a divinity that clung like a fragrance. Perhaps it was something invested there by the multitudes for whom this woman appeared as the Goddess herself; not, for them, a mere symbol of their faith, but in their literal child-minds, the Goddess-self - the great Virgin Mother of the Tribes, Lady of the Land in living form.

Lhiannon raised her head. "Ardanos, you have been staring at me for long enough to milk a cow! Did you come here to tell me

something, or to ask? Out with it, man! The worst I can do is to refuse. And when have I ever been able to say no to you?"

And these were the words of divinity, thought Ardanos, glad to pull a mantle of cynicism over a mood that was becoming oppressive.

"Forgive me, Lady of Holiness," he said mildly. "My thoughts were elsewhere."

He saw her surprise as he rose again, paced restlessly a few steps, then said abruptly, "Lhiannon, I'm worried; I heard a rumor in Deva, and it was repeated by no less a person than the son of the Prefect: Rome may withdraw the Legions. It's the third time that I have heard it spoken, and granted there is always a faction howling, 'Down with Rome', but —"

"And too many of those who pass rumors on and howl, are expecting - or at least hoping — that we will get up and howl along with them. I do not believe your rumor," said Lhiannon bluntly. "But if it should be so, I am sure we could live without them. Is that not what we have been praying for since Caractacus walked the streets of Rome in chains?"

"Have you any idea what chaos that would create?" Ardanos asked. "The very same faction howling, 'Down with Rome' —" He was still pleased with the metaphor . . .

"- certainly do not understand what will happen if they get their wish," said Lhiannon.

Ardanos thought, She knows me very well; even now, we finish"' one another's thoughts. But he did not wish to finish that train of thought.

"Granted that there has been such a faction since Caesar won the fame he needed to rule Rome by invading Britannia! Even now, they will expect those of us from the Sacred Grove to join in their cries," Ardanos said, "and will not understand when we are silent. Just now I am worried that it will erupt into rioting at Beltane -"

"No, I think Beltane is safe enough," Lhiannon said. "People come for the games, the fires and feasting, and all the rest. If it were Samaine, now —"

"These last levies have made things worse," said Ardanos. "They took thirty of Bendeigid's men, all the slaves set free when he was proscribed, and his own sworn man. Proscribed!" He laughed mirthlessly. "He doesn't know how lucky he was; only forbidden to live within twenty miles of Deva! And even so he hasn't found out about all the levies yet, but when he does - well, he's called me worse things than traitor before; his name-calling doesn't bother me.

"I have permission to hold the Beltane gathering — I went to Macellius Severus himself and asked him for leave to hold a peaceful festival - as it's been this last seven or eight years — in the name of Ceres, and it's because he knows and trusts me that they didn't send along a few legionaries to make sure they don't get out of order and - shall we say - decide to worship Mars instead."

Lhiannon sighed, and he knew that she was remembering those days of blood and fire when Boudicca had sacrificed men to the Goddess in return for victory. They had all been so young in those days, so sure they could bring back the days of glory with a little courage and a sharp sword.

"If there's any disturbance," said Ardanos, "any demonstration even, you know as well as I do that this part of the country will be cut to pieces. But how could I know their Legions had just marched through and levied thirty good men to rot in those filthy Mendip mines?"

But he should have known; he was supposed to know what the Romans were up to almost before they knew it themselves. He had to be ready for the next outrage, whatever it might be.

She said, "Canceling the rites at this late date would probably create unrest even where there was none. Do you want me to try it? Have there been any incidents, reaction to the levies, perhaps?"

"I'm not sure," Ardanos said. "Someone seems to have tried to arrange for the Prefect's son to . . . disappear -"

"The Prefect's son?" Lhiannon raised one thin eyebrow as if wondering why anyone should care. "To protest, or to make trouble for our people? Wouldn't it be more like Bendeigid to murder the men who came to take away the levies?"

"He found the lad trapped in a boar pit and saved his life, and now the boy is a guest in his home."

Lhiannon stared at him for a moment and began to laugh. "And your son-in-law Bendeigid does not know?"

"The lad looks enough like his Silure mother to pass for one of ours, and he's self-possessed enough not to give himself away. But he'll need to do some healing before he can be moved. If anything happens to the youngster, who's never, as far as I know, done anything much either good or ill, you know as well as I do that we'll be blamed for it. We get blamed for everything else, all the way back to and including the sack of Troy, and the very fact that the Legions are here and not back in Gaul where they belong. There are all the old atrocity stories that go back to the deified Julius - may he rest in peace," Ardanos added with a fierce grin that meant, she was certain, the exact opposite.

"Still, there is an element of rebellion," he said. "You don't see it, placed as you are; I don't see it much, living among Romans as I've done for so long. But it's my business to watch the winds. To see signs and omens. For instance - where ravens fly at midnight; I speak of the secret society that worships the Lady of Battles."

This made her laugh. "Oh, Ardanos! Those half-crazy old men who sacrifice to Cathubodva, telling fortunes and looking for omens in dead birds' guts - as bad as the Legions with their sacred chicken-coops - no one has ever paid the slightest attention to them -"

"That's what they were," Ardanos said. He told himself that he welcomed being able to tell Lhiannon something she did not know. In the old days, the priestesses had been equal with the Druids in their councils, but since the fall of Mona they had learned to be secret in order to survive. On occasion, the Arch-Druid even had to act on his own. Ardanos wondered sometimes if they might not be carrying it too far - if the priestesses might carry out the decisions of the Council better if they had a voice in making them. Then he would not have felt so alone with the problem.

"That is surely what they were, not three years ago. Now suddenly, instead of old priests and sacrificers, they're a group of young men, not one of whom is over twenty-one and most of whom were born in the Holy Island, who think they are reincarnations of the Sacred Band —"

"Those children! Born as they were, it would not surprise me." Her smooth brow wrinkled as she began to understand.

"Exactly so," he continued. "That boy Cynric whom Bendeigid is fostering is one of them, and my son-in-law, who always did have a touch of the fanatic, has lost no opportunity to share his politics with the boy!"

Lhiannon turned white. "How, may I ask, did that happen?"

"I never knew it would make any difference; it was before my daughter Rheis married Bendeigid, and I did not know him so well. By the time I realized how much trouble either of them could make, it was too late. Cynric's all set to begin where his foster father leaves off. He and Bendeigid between them managed to find most of the other boys - and there were the Ravens, with a name and an organization ready to hand . . .

"If anything should happen to me, or to you -" He shook his head, grimacing. "Who could stop them from trying to avenge their mothers' shame on Rome? Already folk from here to the lakes are going about telling one another that these men are reincarnated heroes."

"And so they might be," Lhiannon said,

Ardanos grunted. "The worst of it is, they look it."

"I recommended that they should all be drowned, remember, not just the girls," said Lhiannon, recovering her composure. "Cruel as it sounds, it would have saved trouble now. But there were some who had other ideas; they were tender-hearted or, like Bendeigid, they wanted to raise the boys to take revenge for the priestesses. And so they are still alive and it is more than twenty years too late to deny their existence. I cannot now say that they have no right to avenge."

Never that, Ardanos thought. He must never suggest that the word of Lhiannon was her own word, or the word of the priests, and not the word of the Goddess. He must not remind her that the word of Lhiannon had never differed in any essential way from the agreed will of the Council of Druids, or that the Goddess - if she existed at all, he thought cynically, had long since ceased to care or to intervene in what became of her worshipers, or of anybody else, except - or maybe including - her priestess.

He said carefully, "I was implying nothing. I merely remind you — will you not be seated? Your guard is eyeing me most disquietingly -I said only that if the Goddess answers your prayers for peace, She also hears, and ignores, the prayers of most of the population for open rebellion or war. How long will She continue to hear your prayers and ignore theirs? Or to put it even more bluntly" — but not bluntly enough, he thought - "forgive me for this, but you are not a young woman — what of the day when you no longer serve the shrine?"

If I could only speak the truth to her. A passion he thought he had forgotten tightened his throat. She and I grow weak with the years, but Rome is still strong. Who will teach the young ones how to preserve our ancient ways until Rome in her turn grows old, and our land is our own once more?

After a moment she dropped into a chair and shielded her eyes with her hands. She said, "Do you think I have not considered that?"

"I know you have thought of it," he said. "And I know the result of your thoughts. Vernemeton might one day be served by one who, let us say, answered the cries of the many for war, rather than the prayers of her Priestess. And then there would be war. And you know what will become of us then."

"I can only serve the shrine while I live," said Lhiannon bitterly. "Even you cannot ask more of me than that."

"While you live," echoed the old Druid. "It is of that we must speak now." Lhiannon passed her hand across her eyes. More gently, he asked, "Do you not choose your own successor?"

"In a sense." She drew a deep breath. "They say I will know when I am to die and thus pass on my powers and such wisdom as is mine. You know who makes the real choice. I was not Helve's chosen. She loved me, yes, but I was not her choice. That one - her name does not matter; she was but nineteen, and disturbed in her wits. It was she on whom Helve's choice fell; she gave that girl the kiss of farewell, and yet she was not even considered nor given any trial at the hands of the gods. Why not? No doubt you know better than I. The priests make the final choice. What I say about my successor will have little weight — unless I am careful to name someone acceptable to them."

"Yet," said Ardanos, "It could be arranged - that your choice would be theirs."

She said, "Your choice, you mean."

"If you will." He sighed. She was simply too quick to see through him, he could hardly resent that — certainly not now. '^

"I tried that once," said Lhiannon wearily, "with Caillean; and you know how that experiment turned out."

"Do I?" he asked.

Lhiannon looked at him oddly. "You should pay more attention to what is happening in the Forest House. I suspect you would find it hard to trust her; she has the extremely awkward habit of thinking, usually at precisely the wrong time."

"But she is the senior priestess. If you were to die tomorrow you know Caillean would be chosen - unless," he added with emphasis, "she were to die in the hour of trial." Lhiannon paled, and he went on, "You know best if she would be acceptable to the gods . . ."

She was silent this time, and he added persuasively, "But if there were someone else, less well known, whom you could train. If the Council. . .never suspected prearrangement —"

"If the girl was suitable and intelligent I cannot see why it should be thought a crime or a blasphemy to prepare her for the choice of the gods . . . or even for the ordeal at their hands," the old High Priestess said thoughtfully.

Ardanos was silent; he knew he could drive her only so far. Outside he could hear wind soughing in the trees, but there was no sound but their breathing within the room.

"Whom have you chosen for me to choose?" Lhiannon asked.

For the three days preceding one of the festivals at which she was to serve as the Voice of the Goddess, the High Priestess lived in seclusion, attended only by her chosen priestess, resting, meditating, and purifying herself. Caillean, who almost always stayed with her, welcomed this time of separation. The shelter of the Forest House could be constricting, and whenever so many women, however holy, lived together, there were bound to be conflicts from time to time.

But now she found it hard to put memories of the outside world behind her. She spooned oat porridge - made more nourishing by the addition of nutmeats, since the High Priestess might have no animal flesh during her time of purification — into a carved wooden bowl and offered it to Lhiannon.

"What did Ardanos want of you?" Caillean heard the bitterness in her own voice, but could not stop the words. "I did not expect to see him here until the day of the festival."

"You must not speak so of the Arch-Druid, child," Lhiannon shook her head, frowning. "He has a heavy load to bear."

"So have you," Caillean said tartly. "And he makes it no lighter with his demands on you."

Lhiannon shrugged, and Caillean thought once more how fragile those shoulders were to bear the weight of so many hopes and fears.

"He does the best he can," the High Priestess said as if she had not heard. "He worries about what will happen when I am gone."

Caillean looked at her in alarm. It was said that a priestess, especially one of high degree, would know her time. "Have you seen some omen - has he?"

Lhiannon shook her head fretfully. "He spoke in general, but someone must take thought for these things. No one is immortal, and whoever is to succeed me will have to begin her training soon."

For a moment Caillean looked at her. Then she laughed.

"By that am I to understand that none of us who are already trained is acceptable - especially me? Do not bother to answer,"

she said then. "I know that you will only defend him, and in truth I do not mind. The title of High Priestess is not enough to justify what I have seen you suffer all these years." Especially, she thought,-since the honor of it was empty so long as Lhiannon did not choose to exercise her power.

Lhiannon made a movement of discomfort, and Caillean realized that she was treading too near forbidden ground. She had been closer to the older woman than a daughter since before her moonblood began to flow, and that was more than twenty years ago, so she knew how Lhiannon depended on the illusions that cushioned her reality.

Another woman might have asked Caillean what she wanted instead. Caillean's lips twisted wryly as she cleared away the half-eaten porridge for, indeed, she herself did not know. But her heart told her that there must be more to serving the Goddess than these formal rituals with their tantalizing hints of power.

The secret teachings of the Druids included tales of a time long ago when priests from a lost land now sunk beneath the sea had come to Britannia. They had been masters of magic, and as they married into the ruling lines of the people they found here and later into the families of each new group of conquerors, the old blood, and the old knowledge had been preserved. But those most learned in that lore had died on Mona, and their knowledge with them.

Sometimes it seemed to Caillean that what they retained at the Forest House was only the dregs of greatness. Most of the other women were content with their small magic, but from time to time Caillean would feel an odd conviction that there must be more. She had spoken truth to Lhiannon - she did not want to be Priestess of the Oracle. And yet if not that, what was it that she wanted to do?

"It is time for our morning devotions," Lhiannon's voice pierced her distraction. The older woman gripped the table and pushed herself upright.

And Goddess forbid that we should fail to perform even the slightest step in the ritual! thought Caillean as she helped the High Priestess to move out to the garden and settle herself before the plain stone altar there. But as Caillean lit the lamp set on its top and brought the flowers to lay before it, she found a measure of peace returning to her soul.

"Behold, Thou art come with the dawning adorned with flowers," Lhiannon said softly, lifting her hands in salutation.

"Thy radiance blazes in the strengthening sun and in the holy fire," Caillean replied.

"In the east arising, Thou art come to bring new life to the world." The voice of the High Priestess seemed to grow younger, purer, and Caillean knew that if she looked, she would have seen the lines of age fading from Lhiannon's face, until the beauty of the Maiden Goddess shone from her eyes.

But by then, the same power was filling her own heart.

"The flowers spring up in Thy footsteps; the earth grows green where Thou dost pass . . ." As she had so many times before, she allowed the rhythm of the rite to carry her to a place where there was only the Lady's harmony.

On the morning of the Beltane festival, Eilan woke before dawn in the women's house where she slept with her sisters. Eilan's bed, a wooden frame strung with rawhide and covered with skins and fine woolen blankets, was built up against the sloping thatched roof, so close that she could reach up and touch it. Over the years she had widened a crack in the mud plastering to a chink through which she could peer. Outside, the light of an early summer dawn was just beginning to break.

With a sigh she lay back again, trying to remember her dreams. There had been something about the festival, and then the scene had changed. There had been an eagle there, she knew, and she had been a swan, and then, it seemed to her, the eagle had become a swan as well, and they had both flown away.

Little Senara still slumbered; she slept closest to the wall for she was still small enough to fall out of bed. Her sharp bent knees poked into Eilan's side. Across the room Mairi, who had temporarily moved back in with her sisters until they learned what had happened to Rhodri, slept with her child; and on the outside Dieda, her loose pale hair scattered across her face, and her shift undone so that Eilan could see about her neck the chain that held Cynric's ring.

Rheis and Bendeigid did not know yet that the two had plighted themselves to one another. The secrecy made Eilan uneasy. But they meant to announce it at this festival, and ask the family to begin the complex negotiations regarding dowry and settlements so that they could be wed. At least Cynric had no living kin, which would make it simpler.

The only other furniture in the room was a bench fixed against the wall and the oaken chest in which the girls kept their extra shifts and holiday garments. It had belonged to Rheis before she married, and she had always said that when Dieda was wed it would be a part of her dower. Eilan did not grudge her this, for another, equally fine one intended for Eilan was already taking shape at the hands of old Vab the joiner. And in due time there would be one for Senara. She had seen the oak planks rubbed until they shone, and the wooden pegs stained till they did not show.

The baby whimpered sleepily and then began to squall, and Mairi sat up with a sigh, her curly hair an aureole around her face. She got up to change his breech-clout, then came back and laid him across the bed. He gurgled and she patted him.

Eilan put her feet into clogs and said, "Listen; I hear Mother outside. I suppose we had better get up." She pulled on her gown, and Dieda opened her eyes and said, "I'll be dressed in a minute."

Mairi laughed. "I'll help Rheis as soon as I've fed the babe. You and Eilan can stay here and make yourselves beautiful for the festival. If any of the young men have caught your fancy, you'd best be prepared to shine." She smiled kindly at her young kinswoman. Dieda, with two younger brothers at home, was not accustomed to being pampered, and they all connived to spoil her a little whenever she was here.

When Mairi and her child had gone, Dieda smiled and said sleepily, "Is it truly festival day? I thought that was tomorrow."

"It is today," teased Eilan, "when you and Cynric will plight your troth."

"Will Bendeigid approve, do you think?" Dieda asked. "He is" Cynric's foster father after all."

"Oh, if your father gives his consent, it does not much matter what mine thinks," observed Eilan shrewdly. "And if he did disapprove of the two of you being together, I suppose he would have said so before now. Besides, I dreamed last night about you and Cynric at the festival."

"Did you? Tell me!" Dieda sat up, wrapping the bedclothes around her, for the air was still cool.

"I don't remember much about it. But your father was happy. Are you sure you want to marry that brother of mine?"

"I do, indeed," said Dieda with a small smile, and Eilan knew she would say no more.

Eilan said, "Maybe I should ask Cynric — he might have more to say!" and laughed.

"And maybe he would not," said Dieda. "He does not talk that much either. You do not want to marry him yourself, do you?"

Eilan shook her head emphatically. "He is my brother!" If she had to marry, surely the great hulking lout who used to put frogs in her bed and pull her hair was the last boy she would choose!

"That's not really so, you know," Dieda said.

"He is my foster brother, and that is like kin," Eilan corrected. "If Father wished us to marry, he would not have fostered him." She reached for a comb of carved horn and began to unbraid the glistening strands of her hair.

Dieda lay back with a sigh. I suppose Lhiannon will be at the festival. . ." she said after a time.

"Of course she will. The Forest House lies by the spring at the foot of the hillfort after all. Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. Now that I'm thinking about getting married it makes me shiver to imagine spending one's life that way," said Dieda.

"No one has asked it of you," said Eilan.

"Not in so many words," said Dieda. "But Father did ask me once if I had ever thought of giving myself to the gods."

"He asked you that?" Eilan's eyes grew wide.

"I said I had not," said Dieda, "but for weeks after I had nightmares that we had quarreled and he had imprisoned me in a hollow tree. And I do love Cynric. Anyway, I could not bear to live my whole life within the Forest House - or confined in any other house whatever. Would you?"

"I do not know - Eilan said. "Perhaps if I were asked I would agree —" She remembered how the priestesses moved through the festival, so serene in their dark blue gowns. They were honored like queens. Wouldn't that be a better life than being at some man's beck and call? And the priestesses were taught all the hidden lore.

"And yet I saw you looking at the young stranger," Dieda teased; "the one Cynric rescued. I think you would make a worse priestess than I!"

"Maybe you are right," Eilan turned away so that the other girl would not see the color that was heating her brow. She was concerned about Gawen because she had spent so much time tending him, that was all. "I have never thought much about it. But now I remember," she said thoughtfully, "Lhiannon was also in my dream." 

Four

Later that morning the family set out for the festival. It was a fair May day, with a freshness in the air from the rain the night before, but the wind had driven the last of the clouds eastward and overhead the sky was clear. On such a morning, all the world's colors seemed newly created to honor the day.

Gaius was still limping, but Cynric had taken the bandage from his ankle, saying it would do him good to walk on it. He walked carefully, breathing deeply of the cool air, doubly inebriating after so long spent lying down indoors. Two weeks ago it had seemed he would never walk under the open sky again. For the moment it was enough to be alive, watching the sunlight on the green leaves and the spring flowers and the bright clothing of the folk around him.

Eilan had put on a long loose gown woven in crossed squares of pale golds and browns and a color like budding leaves over an undertunic of pale green. Her hair lay in a shining cape across her shoulders, brighter than the gold of her brooches and bracelets. It seemed to him that in all that glowing world she was the fairest thing of all.

He paid little attention to their chatter about the festival. He had seen a few celebrations among his mother's people when he was a child, and he supposed this one would be much the same. He heard the noise of the festival before they got there, for the great Celtic festivals were generally combined with a market fair. The festivities had actually begun some days before, and would go on for some time after, but this - the eve of Beltane — was the focus of the festival. It was at dusk that the Priestess of the Oracle would appear.

The woods had blossomed with tents and bothies of woven branches, for the festival had attracted folk from many days' journey away. Most of the people here were Cornovii, but Gaius recognized the tribal tattooing of Dobunni and Ordovices and even some Deceangli from up near Deva. After two weeks in the house of Bendeigid, the British speech of his birth came easily to his tongue, and Deva and the Legion were beginning to seem dim and far away.

Around the base of the old hillfort were clustered stalls selling dishes and small wares, some looking as if they had been made by local peasantry, and some which could have been sold in Rome itself. Perhaps they were of Roman make, for there was a growing trade between Britain and Rome, and the Greek and Gaulish traders went everywhere. There were stalls of apples and sweets, markets where people were trading horses, and a hiring fair where you could find anything, so Cynric said, from a swineherd to a wet nurse.

But when Gaius reached the flattened top of the hill that lifted like an island above the sea of forest, his eyes widened. The fair occupied the grounds of a great cleared earthwork, too full of booths and folk for the perimeter to be visible. But at the far end of the main aisle rose a great earthen barrow, whose entrance was of stone. Cynric made a sign of reverence as they crossed the road.

Gaius asked, "Is that your temple, then?"

Cynric gave him a curious look, but said only, "It is the burial place of a great chief among our forefathers. Unless some of the older bards know who he was, his name is lost, and if there was ever a song about him I have forgotten it, or never learned."

Another, longer avenue led to a building like a small square tower surrounded by a thatched portico, and Gaius gave it a curious glance. Eilan whispered, "That is the shrine where they keep the holy things."

"It looks like a temple," he said in a low voice, and she stared at him.

"Surely you know that the gods cannot be worshiped in any house made with human hands, but only under the open sky?" She added after a moment, "On some of the western islands, where no trees grow, they hold the rites in forests of stone; but my father says that the secrets of the great ancient rings of stone here in the South were lost with the senior Druids who were killed when the Romans came."

A booth where they were selling bangles of Greek glass caught her eye and she stopped talking. Gaius sighed. Better not ask anymore questions, he thought, lest he betray himself further. There were some things they would certainly expect even a Silure tribesman to know.

There were stalls of brooms and mops, and pretty girls selling garlands — almost everyone wore a garland - flowers and a good many other things, some too alien for Gaius to recognize. The young people wandered among the booths, casually looking at their wares. Cynric inquired for a swineherd but said that they all demanded too much for their labor.

"The accursed Romans have taken so many men in their levies that we must hire men to tend our beasts and till our fields," he said. "But so many folk have been driven from their lands that we can sometimes find men who will come for shelter and food alone. I suppose if I were a farmer I would be glad of that. But may the gods save me from tilling the land!"

At noon Rheis gathered her family together beneath a spreading oak tree at the base of the hill for some cold meat and bread. The old hillfort was the focus for many pathways. From here they could see a broad and well-tended way that ran westward, lined with stately oak trees. At its very end the thatched roofs of the Forest House and its outbuildings showed pale against the deep green of the Sacred Grove.

Cynric and Gaius had gone off to look at horses, and Rheis had drifted away to speak to an acquaintance. The girls were packing up the food, when Eilan froze and whispered, "Look, there is Lhiannon."

The High Priestess, with a few of her attendants, was coming along the Sacred Way between the long line of trees. Her slight figure glimmered in the dappling of sunlight that sifted through the branches, and she moved with the gliding pace of a trained priestess, so that she did not seem quite like a human being at all as she drew near. Lhiannon stopped as if to wish them a joyous festival, and her eyes fell on the girls. "You are the kinswomen of Bendeigid," she said. Her gaze fixed on Dieda. "How old are you, my child?"

"Fifteen," whispered the girl.

"Are you yet married?" Lhiannon asked. Eilan felt her heart begin to thud heavily in her breast. This was the face of the High Priestess as she had seen it in her dream.

"I am not," Dieda said in a still voice. She was staring at the Priestess as if entranced by that clear gaze.

"Nor pledged in marriage?"

"Not. . .yet, although I have thought. . ." her voice faltered.

Tell her, thought Eilan. You are pledged to Cynric! You have to tell her now! But though her lips worked, Dieda stood frozen, like a young hare when the falcon's shadow falls.

Lhiannon unfastened the heavy blue cloak that hung from her shoulders. "Then I claim you for the Goddess; henceforth you shall serve Her whom I serve and no other . . ." The cloak opened like a dark wing as the priestess swung it round, and light flared as the branches moved in a sudden wind.

Eilan blinked. Surely it was only sunlight - but in the dazzle, for a moment she thought that the opening of the cloak had revealed a radiant figure. She closed her eyes, but imprinted upon her inner sight she saw still a Face with a mother's tender smile and a bird of prey's fierce eyes, and it seemed to her that it was she, not Dieda, who was fixed by that gaze. But Lhiannon had not spoken to her, nor seemed to see her at all.

"From henceforward, you shall dwell with us in the Forest House, my child. Come to us there - well, tomorrow will be time enough." Lhiannon's voice seemed to come from a great distance. "So be it."

Eilan opened her eyes once more and saw the shadow fall as the cloak settled across Dieda's slim shoulders.

The women who followed Lhiannon intoned, "She is the beloved of the Goddess; Her choice has fallen. So be it."

Lhiannon took the cloak from the girl's shoulders and her attendants helped her to fasten it again. Then she moved away from them, towards the festival.

Eilan's eyes were still fixed on her. "The choice of the Goddess . . .you are to be one of them . . .What is the matter with you?" She came back to herself and saw that Dieda's face was deathly white, her hands locked together.

Dieda shook her head, shivering, "Why couldn't I speak? Why couldn't I tell her? I cannot go to the Forest House - I am pledged to Cynric!"

"But you aren't not yet, not formally," said Eilan, still dazzled by what she had seen. "Private promises aren't binding, and nothing has gone so far that it cannot be undone. I should think that anyone would rather be a priestess than marry my brother —"

"You should think-" said Dieda furiously. "Yes, you really should think, sometime - it would be a new experience for you, I dare say —" She broke off in something like despair. "You're such a child, Eilan!"

Eilan stared at her, realizing that the other girl did not share her excitement. "Dieda, are you saying that you don't want to be a priestess?"

"What a pity her choice did not fall upon you," said Dieda helplessly. "Maybe we should say it was you. Maybe, like Father, she mistook us. Maybe it was really you she meant —"

"But that would be impiety, if the Goddess has chosen you," Eilan protested.

"What am I going to say to Cynric? What is there that I can say to him?" Her control broke and she began to laugh helplessly.

"Dieda," Eilan put her arm around the other girl, "can't you speak to your father? Tell him that you don't want this? If it were me, I should be happy, but if you hate the idea —"

Numbly, choked with misery, Dieda said, "I dare not. Father would never understand, nor cross the High Priestess. There is something —" In a voice which hardly reached her kinswoman's ears, she said, "Father is so much Lhiannon's friend - it's almost as if he were her lover —"

Scandalized, Eilan turned her eyes upon the other girl. "How can you say that? She is a priestess!"

"I don't mean they've done anything wrong, but he has known her so long. He seems at times to care more about her than anyone alive — surely more than any of us girls!"

"Take care how you say such things," Eilan warned, her face flushing. "Someone else might hear who would understand you no better than I did."

Dieda said dismally, "Oh, what does it matter? I wish I were dead!"

Eilan did not know what to say to comfort her. She was silent, clinging to the other girl's hand. She could not understand how Dieda might wish to refuse this honor. And how happy it would make Rheis, that her youngest sister should be chosen.

Bendeigid too would be pleased; Dieda was like another daughter to him and he had always been fond of his wife's little sister. Eilan tried to forget her own disappointment.

Gaius and Cynric moved through the holiday crowd, pausing from time to time to comment on the points of some pony, then moving on. After a time Cynric asked, "Is it true then, friend, that you know nothing of what befell on the Isle of Mona? I had thought -if you lived near Deva —"

"I have never heard the story," Gaius said. "I'm from the country of the Silures, remember, away to the south." And knowing that my mother was married to a Roman officer, he thought then, it would have taken a braver man than most to tell me. "Is it some well-known tale?" he said aloud. "You said that the Druid Ardanos could sing it."

"Hear it then, and wonder no more why I have little that is good to say of the Romans," said Cynric angrily. "There was - in the days before the Romans came - a sacred enclosure of women where now is nothing but a polluted pool. One day the Legions came - and did what they always do; cut down the grove and plundered its treasures, murdered such Druids as contested with them, and raped all the women - from the oldest priestess to the youngest novice. Some were near to grandmothers in age, some no more than little girls of nine or ten, but that did not matter to them!"

Gaius gasped. He had never heard that part of the story. The Romans spoke only of the Druids with their tossing torches and the dark-clad women who had shrieked imprecations, and said that the legionaries had been afraid to cross the boiling waters of the Menai strait until their commander shamed them into attacking. Mona had been the final stronghold of the Druid priesthood. Until meeting Bendeigid and Ardanos, he had thought most of them had been wiped out. Military logic made it obvious that Mona must be destroyed. But a good commander, he thought angrily, kept his men in line. Had the soldiers reacted so violently because the women made them afraid?

"What happened to the women? You may well ask," said Cynric. As a matter of fact, Gaius had not asked; but he knew that Cynric was telling the tale as he had been taught, and would sooner or later get around to that.

"The Romans left most of the women pregnant," Cynric went on. "When the babies were born, the girls were drowned in the sacred pool the Romans had already desecrated, and the boys were fostered with the families of Druids. When they came to manhood they were told of their background, and they were given training at arms. And one day they are to avenge their mothers and their gods; and, believe me, they will! They will swear it by the Lady of Ravens who hears me!" he added vehemently. He fell silent, and Gaius waited uneasily for him to go on. Cynric had spoken of an underground movement called the Ravens. Was the other boy, then, one of them?

After a moment Cynric continued, "That was when all the women of the Druids on this isle were brought here to the Forest House where they could be guarded."

Gaius listened, wondering if the tale had been told him for a reason. But Cynric did not know he was Roman, and Gaius was very glad. At the moment he was not sure he wanted to be a Roman himself, although it had been the wellspring of his pride.

As dusk began to fall young men in white robes with golden torques about their necks began piling up two great heaps of wood in the open space before the barrow, making sure - as Cynric informed him in a whisper - that each included the wood of the nine sacred trees. Gaius had no idea what those were, but was afraid to admit it, so he simply nodded. Between them a plank of oak had been placed with a piece set upright like an axle. Nine Druids, old, imposing men in spotless white robes, took turns to spin the axle to the beat of a drum. As the sky darkened, people gathered around them, watching, and silence spread through the crowd.

And then, just as the sun slipped beyond the trees, Gaius glimpsed a spark of red. Others had seen it as well. A murmur rippled through the crowd, and in the same moment one of the Druids cast something powdery at the base of the axle and it seemed to explode into flame.

"The fires will burn till dawning, while folk dance around them," said Cynric. "And some of the lads will keep watch over the Beltane tree." He gestured towards a tall pole that stood at the other end of the hilltop. "The rest will be out until dawn with their sweethearts gathering greenery, or at least that is what they say" — he grinned suggestively - "and will bring it back in the morning to crown the pole and dance in the day."

The need-fire had been carried to the woodpiles, which were now beginning to crackle merrily. It was growing dark; Gaius stepped back as the first blast of heat tingled on his skin.

A line of dancers formed and began to circle the bonfires. Someone set a wine flask to Gaius's lips. Already the crowd was getting rowdier, dipping freely into the vats of ale and mead. He had seen rites like this before and knew what to expect. He noticed now that the smaller children had been taken away; the young priestesses in the blue robes and fillets and veils of the Forest House were no longer among the crowd.