Taminy Read online

  Osraed Calach’s sweet voice rang off on the breeze and the crowd remained silent. Gwynet felt her cheeks. They were hot, surely putting out as much light as the myriad light-bowls on their tall stands. She told herself, secretly, it was her future she listened to as first Lealbhallain, then Wyth came forward to give his Tell. The people of Nairne applauded the wonderful tales with every ounce of exuberance they possessed. By the time Wyth retired from the Gallery’s balustrade, every man, woman and child was bubbling over with the spirit of celebration. It only remained for Ealad-hach to bless them and dismiss them to the Tell Fest.

  He came forward to do so, raised his hands high, opened his mouth wide and was pressed to silence by a great commotion at the foot of the Gallery stair. The crowd there gabbled and milled, the musicians parted, and a slight figure in a tapestry riot of color scurried up the steps toward the landing.

  “Osraed!” The voice was as strident as the colors its owner wore. A white hand thrust out of the raucous folds of fabric and pointed heavenward. “Osraed, hear me!” The figure tottered to a point just below where an incredulous Ealad-hach gaped, then turned and addressed the gathering.

  “Hearken all, to old Marnie! Hear what I say! These boys are not the only home-comers here. Ask the Osraed Bevol and he may tell you of another.”

  A clutter of murmurs, hisses and guffaws spilled through the crowd and Osraed Ealad-hach at last lowered his arms. “What are you saying, old woman? Speak clearly.”

  “Ah, clearly, is it? I’ll tell you clearly what I saw. Me, Marnie-o-Loom! In the garden at Gled Manor.”

  Gwynet felt Taminy stiffen and clutch the hand she held. The older girl made a hissing sound through her teeth. “Ah,” she breathed, “so yours are the curious eyes, old one. Sharp, they are.”

  Marnie’s audience heckled her now—gently, tolerantly—and begged her down.

  “Leave off, Marnie!” cried Niall Backstere. “Let us get to Fest and I’ll give you the fattest cream bonny in my stall.”

  “Aye, and hot, honeyed cider,” added the Spenser.

  “I saw the girl, I tell you.” Marnie folded her hands before her, smug-meek.

  “What girl?” shouted one man.

  “Aw, she’s drunk!” cried another.

  “No, just crazy.”

  “I’m neither drunk nor crazy,” Marnie retorted, pose shifting to the defensive. “Nor am I blind. The night Osraed Bevol came in from Meredydd-a-Lagan’s Pilgrimage, he had with him a boy, a little girl, and a young woman. The same young woman I saw in his garden not a day past. Meredydd-a-Lagan doesn’t lie in the Sea. She hides at Gled Manor!”

  In the uproar that followed, Marnie-o-Loom fed and flourished; turning her flushed face and glittering eyes upward to the Gallery she devoured her reward.

  It was Ealad-hach who turned to Osraed Bevol and asked, “Is there any truth to what she says?” And the citizens of Nairne, catching, one by one, the scent of suspense, quieted to hear the answer.

  Bevol smiled. “There is a grain of truth to it.” The admission fattened Marnie’s grin. “I did,” he continued, when the crowd had hushed again, “bring home to Nairne a boy. That was Skeet. You all know Skeet. And I brought home a little girl—Gwynet, whom you also know. And ...” He gazed around with gleaming eyes until he found Taminy and Gwynet on their stone perch. The smile deepened. “And I brought home with me a young woman.”

  Again, Marnie reaped her pandemonium, her own gap-tooth smile growing to cover half her face.

  “But it was not Meredydd-a-Lagan.”

  Disappointment. Gwynet felt it the way one feels river rheum or salt tang. It swelled from the crowd like a midnight mist, and she could only wonder at its cause. Had they loved Meredydd-a-Lagan so? Or was it only the sport they missed of scandal close to home? Looking at Marnie, she could almost imagine the Mam of her once-guardian, Ruhf Airdsgainne, gossip-tongued and mugging—holding out some sinful morsel while the bored dwellers in Blaec-del snapped after it. Could these people from the clean, proud streets of Nairne be at all like those people?

  “He lies!” accused Marnie as if the words had been perched on her lips. She let them fly again. “He lies!”

  Bevol’s expression lost its good humor in a breath. “I do not lie, weaver-woman. The girl at Gled Manor is not my Prentice Meredydd.”

  “Who then?” asked Ealad-hach and, “Come,” said Calach, “stop teasing us and let us meet this young woman.”

  “Yes,” agreed Marnie, nodding vigorously. “If it’s not Meredydd, prove it. Show her to us.”

  Bevol turned to his peers. The Osraed on the Gallery nodded as a man. He returned the nod and looked to where Gwynet and Taminy sat hunkered against the wall. Taminy rose and, drawing Gwynet after her, left the stone steps and crossed to the Gallery. The throng parted before them, eyes probing and curious, eyes hungry and willing to be scandalized. Gwynet glanced up once or twice, then thought better of it.

  They passed Marnie on the Great Stair and Taminy paused to greet her eye to eye. “Your sight is sharp, Marnie-o-Loom,” Taminy told her, “but your sense of color is failing. Meredydd’s eyes are brown.”

  They continued on then, while the old gossip sputtered like a guttering flame, reaching the end of the climb. There, in the Osraed Gallery, with every wakeful eye of Nairne and the surrounding Gyldan-holt watching, Taminy turned to the Court, dropped her cowl and pulled off her scarf. Wheat-pale hair covered her shoulders in a flood and made banners in the light breeze. But among all the people, only Osraed Ealad-hach and Marnie-o-Loom showed anything more than mild surprise.

  oOo

  It was a deep irony, she thought, that once—dear God, a hundred years ago—she had dreamed of standing upon this great stone platform and of opening her mouth to sing the Meri’s duan. But she would give no Tell tonight to ears unwilling and unready to hear it. Osraed Bevol spoke instead, giving a name that rippled quickly across a sea of lips and was gone: Taminy. Only Taminy. Like Gwynet, a refugee found in the course of Meredydd’s Pilgrimage.

  The crowd, relieved to be able to laugh at Marnie’s red-faced discomfiture and eager to be celebrating, accepted it and went about their business.

  So, she thought. So, I’m to be allowed to fade back and away.

  But she wasn’t, quite. The white-haired old Osraed’s eyes bored awl-like and the tall young one’s shyly prodded. She glanced from one to the other, then hurried down the steps and into the teeming courtyard where mothers weighed her and sons admired her and daughters feigned indifference. She was dancing before she knew it, marveling at how little the steps had changed.

  It was during a break in the dancing, as she searched for Skeet and Gwynet near a stall selling hot, sweet cider, that she saw the tall young Osraed again, standing gawpishly to one side and trying not to stare too rudely. He moved toward her when their eyes met, his face a patchwork of bemusement and uncertainty. He stopped before her, opened his mouth to speak, then glanced away.

  She took pity. “You’d be Wyth,” she said and drew his eyes back.

  “How do you know me?”

  She smiled. “Oh, someone must have mentioned you ... pointed you out.”

  A moment passed, filled only with eddies of babble and song from the happy mob. Wyth glanced down at his hands, clasped over his crystal pendant. He let go of the crystal and put his hands behind him.

  “You’re going to think this odd,” he said. “But I feel ... as if I know you ... or ought to.”

  “You’re Osraed now. There are a good many things you know ... or ought to. The Meri has surely lifted the bar on your senses. They must thrill to have the doors and windows of your mind thrown open so.” And nothing looks or sounds or feels the same, does it?

  He was shaking his head. “Even the night is different,” he said, the words pouring from his mouth as if a bar had been lifted there too. “The darkness, the firelight, the breezes.

  “Darkness has layers, did you know that? Layers of absence. And light-” He paused to glan
ce at the lanterns bobbing about the cider booth. “-light peels back the layers and-” The words ended in a blush that spread from his nose to the corners of his eyes. “I’m-I’m sorry. I’m babbling. You’d not care about any of this.”

  “And the laughter,” she said, “has colors. The blues of sorrow, the reds of anger, the gold and silver of true joy.”

  Gawping again, he shook his head. “How do you know these things?”

  “I live with an Osraed. My father ... was a Cirke-master. I’ve always been drawn to the Meri’s doings.”

  “You’re no mimic.” The gangly gawper was gone, replaced by an astute Osraed. “You speak as one who knows. You see the laughter with your own eyes, not Osraed Bevol’s.”

  She shrugged. “I have been accused,” she said carefully, “of being fey. Once, some called me Wicke and charged me to prove I was not.”

  “And did you?”

  “I was unable. I tried, but the Meri’s will out. She decided my course. It brought me here.”

  “You’re not Wicke,” he said as if his own certitude would make that true for all.

  She laughed. “No, I’m not. But you won’t convince Marnie-o-Loom of that.” Her eyes travelled to the shadowed side of the bright booth where a pinched face trained glitters of jet on them.

  Wyth shivered. “And she calls those eyes.” He held out his arm. “Will you have a cider, Taminy-a-Gled?”

  “Aye. If you will have a dance.”

  He agreed with minimum awkwardness and she took his arm and let him squire her about before all eyes. They ate, they drank, they danced, they strolled the battlements. And when he looked at her oddly time and again, she knew it was only because he had just realized, time and again, that she was not Meredydd-a-Lagan.

  Ah, but a part of you wants me to be that.

  “What did you say?”

  She glanced up at him. He was a layer of darkness, the Meri’s Kiss glowing from his brow, a silhouette against the gleaming, moonlit peaks of the Gyldan-baenn. She had been watching them, though they had neither moved nor changed for perhaps a million years, and he had been watching her, whose changes were more recent. She had let him watch her, let him see that even under layers of darkness, she was not Meredydd.

  “You have sharp ears, Osraed,” she told him. “I didn’t speak.” And a rare man, it is, who hears words that are not spoken.

  “You tease me. I can’t hear your thoughts.”

  “You feel what others feel. You see the color of their laughter, the shadings of their words.”

  “Shadings only. But you spoke. There were words.”

  “There were words. But I thought them.”

  “Why? Why should I hear your thoughts and no others?”

  I told you I was fey. She could feel his eyes holding her moonlit face, his other senses straining through layers of darkness the moonlight could not penetrate. He had heard her. He had not seen her lips move.

  “Bevol has brought you here for a reason. Why has he brought you here? Who are you? Why do I know you? How do I know you?”

  “Perhaps,” she said aloud. “Perhaps you have seen me in a vision, as I have seen you through someone else’s vision.”

  The Kiss between his brows puckered with thought.

  Taminy laughed and laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t glower so, Osraed Wyth. You must learn to laugh more and frown less.”

  oOo

  Perhaps it was the words or the gentle, laughing voice that delivered them or the moonlight on pale hair. Perhaps it was all those things that set up, in Wyth Arundel’s head, a sudden whirlpool of thought and sensation. A second of disorientation was followed by the sharp, clear memory of Master Bevol’s aislinn chamber, of a pool of darkness that would not be still, of a Being of Light and a girl on a beach. No, two girls—one entering the water, one leaving it; one familiar and beloved, the other-

  “Osraed Bevol,” said the moonlit lips, “I have not breathed for a hundred years.”

  The whirl stopped so suddenly, he was nearly dashed from his feet. Like a man plunged in cold water, he trembled, while just beneath his skin, blood pulsed in fitful heat, scalding him. His face burned. He raised his hands to cover it.

  Taminy. Taminy-a-Cuinn. Gifted in the Art, decried as Wicke, condemned to a fugitive Pilgrimage, drowned in the sacred Western Sea. Taminy, whose father returned alone and empty-handed, a seemingly broken man, to give up his duties at Nairne-Cirke and move his household to Ochanshrine at Creiddylad. One hundred years ago. One hundred years.

  “They spent the rest of their days in worship and service,” said the moonlit girl. “They wanted to be as close to me as they could. They wanted to serve the Meri’s Cause.”

  He couldn’t reply. He had no words to speak, no mind to invent them. Overwhelmed, he stumbled away into thicker darkness, leaving her behind him—a silky, silver shadow against the Gyldan-baenn and a star-filled sky.

  oOo

  Leaving the barrage of light and life above and behind, Osraed Ealad-hach took refuge in the darkness of his aislinn chamber. Beneath the soft glow of several tiny lightglobes, he sat, pondering the impenetrable black core of the room, the crystal that would light it cupped in trembling hands.

  He hadn’t been here since the dreams began—since Meredydd-a-Lagan had had thrust them into his nights. He had been afraid to come. Afraid to call out the ghosts and the visions he knew were there. Now, his fear had slid headlong into terror. Now, less than ever did he want to call up the visions; now, more than ever, he knew he must.

  Because of that girl.

  He raised a hand from his lap, cradling the crystal toward the heart of the chamber. The hand shook and his soul shook with it. Whimpering, he pulled the hand back. Already images formed, but in his head, behind his eyes; the girl, dropping her cowl, pulling off her scarf; the girl, dancing on the cobbles, her beautiful, cwenly face alight with pleasure and excitement; the girl, walking the battlements with Osraed Wyth, her hair pale gold in the light of moon and stars.

  Ealad-hach moaned sickly, pressing his temples as if his hands could shove the images into retreat. And her name—Taminy!

  Why Taminy? Why that wretched, cursed, wicked name?

  A flicker of anger insinuated itself into Ealad-hach’s fear. Bevol had chosen that name, like as not. Chosen it because of what it implied about that young woman. Well, he was not gullible as all that. The girl was not Taminy-a-Cuinn, that much was certain. Her name was probably not even Taminy, or hadn’t been until she met Bevol-a-Gled. Taminy-a-Cuinn she could not be, but she could yet be the creature of his nightmare.

  The thought did not let Ealad-hach breathe any more easily. Still, he sat more comfortably in the confines of his private chamber. It was only a matter of knowledge. He would call for the aislinn. That would tell him what to do.

  He leaned forward with a will and put the crystal on the raised and tiled platform at the center of the little room. He fed it his energies then, his dreams, the floating images, the contents of his unconscious thought. Verdant light danced over and around the facets, but it was a faded light, fitful and weak. He tried harder, murmuring a duan to give force to his thoughts.

  The light intensified, steadied. About the crystal, mist that was not mist began to form, spiraling slowly like a twisted wheel of cloud. It grew up, fanned out, gained substance. It separated into earth and sky and sea; a white curl of wave-foam raced up a beach, a moon burned the clouds silver, a wind stirred the air.

  Yes, this was the place. Now, show me. Show me the girl.

  And there was Meredydd-a-Lagan—clear, sharp, as if alive. She melted, was burned away and, burning, she walked into the waters.

  There! There was the girl! Rising from the waves in what seemed a robe of translucent, lucent green. It shed like a skin and she stood, glittering, in the moonlight.

  The old Osraed’s lips moved more swiftly, his duan grew louder, more rhythmic. Sweat beaded on his brow and his cheeks trembled. Her face—he must see her face!
r />   But he could not see it. No duan, no amount of concentration would show it to him, would make the moonlit phantom any more substantial. After a moment more of struggle, his concentration faltered and the vision collapsed into itself.

  Ealad-hach blinked. On its pedestal, the crystal sat, lightless and inert, not even a whisper of aislinn mist clinging to its facets. He felt old. Frail. Worn. He felt barely able to gather up the crystal and return it to its carved and filigreed box, but he did. Then he knelt and prayed that he would be cursed with vivid dreams.

  CHAPTER 5

  The wood of the soul can burn and be fire; the Word of the Spirit is the whirling friction rod above.

  Prayer is the power that makes the Word turn round. And when the Word moves, the mystery of God comes to light.

  — Prayers and Meditations of Osraed Ochan, vs. 5

  Wyth found sleep difficult. The merest straying from consciousness left him literally bewildered, mired in thick emotion, or reeling on the edge of Ruanaidhe’s Leap. In the chill before dawn, he pulled himself fully awake to sit, head in hands, trying not to think. His brain felt like a sodden bath fleece.

  He wanted to pray, but wasn’t certain he wanted the enlightenment he knew he should ask for. He wanted to draw out the visions he could feel pressing like a physical force behind his eyes, but what he fled in sleep was no easier to face awake.

  The heavy pain in his head at last drove him to draw a cup of scented water from a carafe by the bed and rifle his medicament chest for some willow bark. There was none. Instead, he smudged his temples with a pungent salve and sat, coil-legged, on his bed to perform a Healweave.

  Candle in hand, eyes on the flame, he breathed in and sang out, letting the duan float away from him, praying it would take the pain with it. The runesong was only six lines long; Wyth was halfway though it the second time when the pain evaporated so suddenly and completely, it stopped the duan in his throat. The salve’s ice-hot touch penetrated his senses and he imagined, for a moment, that he had felt an actual caress of warm fingers. He took a deep, relaxed breath, letting some gentle force tug him upward out of his tired, awkward frame.