Lady of Avalon Read online

  And now the tides are turning, and in the mortal world a priestess seeks to cross over to the Tor. I sensed the power in her only yesterday, when I met her upon another shore. How is it that she has so suddenly grown old? And this time, she brings with her a boy-child whose spirit I have also known before.

  Many streams of destiny now flow to their joining. This woman and my daughter and the boy are linked in an ancient pattern. For good or for ill? I sense a time coming when it will fall to me to bind them, soul and body, to this place they call Avalon.

  PART 1

  The Wisewoman

  A.D. 96–118

  Chapter One

  It was nearing sunset, and the quiet waters of the Vale of Avalon were overlaid with gold. Here and there tussocks of green and brown raised their heads above the quiet waters, blurred by the glimmering haze which at autumn’s end veiled the marshes even when the sky was clear. At the center of the Vale one pointed tor rose above the others, crowned with standing stones.

  Caillean gazed across the water, the blue cloak that marked her as a senior priestess hanging in motionless folds around her, and felt the stillness dissolving the fatigue of five days on the road. It seemed longer. Surely, the journey from the ashes of the pyre at Vernemeton to the heart of the Summer Country had taken a lifetime.

  My lifetime…, thought Caillean. I shall not leave the House of the Priestesses again. Six months earlier she had brought her little band of women from the Forest House to found a community of priestesses on this isle. Six weeks ago she had gone back, alone, too late to save the Forest House from destruction. But at least she had saved the boy.

  “Is that the Isle of Avalon?”

  Gawen’s voice brought her back to the present. He blinked, as if dazzled by the light, and she smiled.

  “It is,” she said, “and in another moment I will call the barge which will take us there.”

  “Not yet, please—” He turned to her.

  The boy had been growing. He was tall for a lad of ten, but he still looked all haphazardly pieced together, as if the rest of his body had not yet caught up with his feet and hands. Sunlight backlit the summer-bleached strands of his brown hair.

  “You promised me that before I got to the Tor some of my questions would be answered. What will I say when they ask what I am doing here? I am not even certain of my own name!”

  At that moment, his great grey eyes looked so much like his mother’s that Caillean’s heart turned over. It was true, she thought. She had promised to talk to him, but on the journey she had hardly spoken to anyone, wearied as she was by exertion and sorrow.

  “You are Gawen,” she said gently. “It was by that name that your mother first knew your father, and so she gave it to you.”

  “But my father was a Roman!” His voice wavered, as if he did not know whether to be proud or ashamed.

  “That is true, and since he had no other son, I suppose as the Romans count such things you would be called Gaius Macellius Severus, like him and his father before him. Among the Romans it is a respected name. Nor did I ever hear anything of your grandsire but that he was a good and honorable man. But your grandmother was a princess of the Silures, and Gawen the name she gave her son, so you need not be ashamed to own it!”

  Gawen stared at her. “Very well. But it is not my father whose name they will whisper on this Druid isle. Is it true…” He swallowed and tried again. “Before I left the Forest House they were saying…It is true that she—the Lady of Vernemeton—was my mother?”

  Caillean looked at him steadily, remembering with what pain Eilan had kept that secret. “It is true.”

  He nodded, and some of the tension went out of him on a long sigh. “I wondered. I used to daydream—all the children who were being fostered at Vernemeton would boast how their mothers were queens or their fathers were princes who would one day come to take them away. I told stories too, but the Lady was always kind to me, and when I dreamed at night, the mother who came for me was always she….”

  “She loved you,” said Caillean, more softly still.

  “Then why did she never claim me? Why did my father not marry her if he was such a well-known and honorable man?”

  Caillean sighed. “He was a Roman, and the priestesses of the Forest House were forbidden to marry or bear children even to men of the tribes. Perhaps we will be able to change that here, but in Vernemeton…it would have been death for her if your existence had been known.”

  “It was,” he whispered, looking suddenly older than his years. “They found out and they killed her, didn’t they? She died because of me!”

  “Oh, Gawen”—wrenched by pity, Caillean reached out to him, but he turned away—“there were many reasons. Politics—and other things—you will understand more when you are grown.” She bit her lip, afraid to say more, for the revelation of this child’s existence had indeed been the spark that lit the flame, and in that sense, what he said was true.

  “Eilan loved you, Gawen. After you were born she might well have sent you away for fosterage, but she could not bear to be parted from you. She defied her grandfather the Arch-Druid to keep you with her, and he agreed on condition that it was not known you were her own child.”

  “That wasn’t fair!”

  “Fair!” she snapped. “Life is seldom fair! You have been lucky, Gawen. Give thanks to the gods and do not complain.”

  His face flushed red, and then paled, but he did not answer her. Caillean felt her anger fade as suddenly as it had come.

  “It does not matter now, for it is done, and you are here.”

  “But you do not want me,” he whispered. “Nobody does.”

  For a moment she considered him. “I suppose you should know—Macellius, your Roman grandsire, wished to keep you in Deva and to bring you up as his own.”

  “Why, then, did you not leave me with him?”

  Caillean stared at him without smiling. “Do you want to be a Roman?”

  “Of course not! Who would?” he exclaimed, flushing furiously, and Caillean nodded. The Druids who tutored the boys at the Forest House would have taught him to hate Rome. “But you should have told me! You should have let me choose!”

  “I did!” she snapped. “You chose to come here!”

  The defiance seemed to drain out of him as he turned to gaze out over the water once more.

  “That’s true. What I don’t understand is why you wanted me….”

  “Ah, Gawen,” she said, her anger suddenly leaving her. “Even a priestess does not always understand what forces move her. Partly it was that you were all that was left to me of Eilan, whom I loved as my own child.” Her throat closed with the pain of that. It was a few moments before she could speak calmly again. Then she went on, in a voice as cold as stone: “And partly it was because it seemed to me that your destiny lay among us….”

  Gawen’s gaze was still on the golden waters. For a few moments the gentle lap of wavelets against the reeds was the only sound. Then he looked up at her.

  “Very well.” His voice cracked with the effort he was making to maintain control. “Will you be my mother, so that I will have some family of my own?”

  Caillean stared at him, for a moment unable to speak. I should say no, or one day he will break my heart.

  “I am a priestess,” she said finally. “Just as your mother was. The vows that we have sworn to the gods bind us, sometimes against our own desires”—or I would have remained in the Forest House, and been there to protect Eilan, her thought went on. “Do you understand that, Gawen? Do you understand that even though I love you I may sometimes have to do things that cause you pain?”

  He nodded vigorously, and it was her own heart that felt the pang.

  “Foster-mother—what will happen to me on the Island of Avalon?”

  Caillean thought for a moment. “You are too old to stay with the women. You will lodge among the young apprentice priests and bards. Your grandsire was a not able singer, and you may have inherited some of
his talents. Would it please you to study bard-craft?”

  Gawen blinked as if the thought frightened him. “Not yet—please—I don’t know…”

  “Never mind, then. In any case the priests must have some time to know you. You are still very young, and your whole future does not have to be decided now—”

  And when the time comes, it will not be Cunomaglos and his Druids who decide what he should be, she thought grimly. I could not save Eilan, but at least I can guard her child until he can choose for himself….

  “So,” she said briskly, “I have many duties awaiting me. Let me summon the barge and take you to the island. For tonight there will be nothing before you, I promise you, but supper and bed. Will that content you?”

  “It must…” he whispered, looking as if he doubted both her and himself.

  The sun had set. In the west the sky was fading to a luminous rose, but the mists that clung to the waters had cooled to silver. The Tor was almost invisible, as if, she thought suddenly, some magic had divided it from the world. She thought of its other name, Inis Witrin, the Isle of Glass. The fancy was oddly appealing. She would be happy to leave behind the world in which Eilan had burned with her Roman lover on the Druids’ pyre. She shook herself a little, and pulled out a bone whistle from the pouch that hung at her side. The sound it produced was thin and shrill. It did not seem loud, but it carried clearly over the waters.

  Gawen started, looking around him, and Caillean pointed. The open water was edged by reedbeds and marsh, cut through by a hundred twisting channels. A low, square-prowed craft was emerging from one of them, pushing aside the reeds. Gawen frowned, for the man who poled it was no bigger than he. It was only when the barge drew nearer that he saw the lines in the boatman’s weathered face and the sprinkling of silver in his dark hair. When the boatman saw Caillean he saluted, lifting the pole so that the boat’s headway could carry it up onto the shore.

  “That is Waterwalker,” Caillean said softly. “His people were here before the Romans, before even the British came to these shores. None of us have been here long enough to pronounce their language, but he knows ours, and tells me that is the meaning of his name. They make a very poor living from these marshes, and are glad of the extra food we can give them, and our medicines when they are ill.”

  The boy continued to frown as he took his place in the stern of the boat. He sat, trailing one hand in the water and watching the ripples flow past, as the boatman pushed off once more and began to pole them toward the Tor. Caillean sighed, but did not try to talk him out of his sullens. In the past moon they had both suffered shock and loss, and if Gawen was less aware of the significance of what had happened at the Forest House, he was also less able to deal with it.

  Caillean pulled her cloak around her and turned back to face the Tor. I cannot help him. He will have to endure his sorrow and confusion…as will I, she thought grimly, as will I….

  Mist swirled around them, then thinned as the Tor loomed up before them. The hollow call of a horn echoed from above. The boatman gave one last heave on his pole, and the keel grated on the shore. He jumped out and pulled it farther, and as it came to rest Caillean climbed out.

  Half a dozen priestesses were coming down the path, their hair braided down their backs, gowned in undyed linen girdled in green. They drew up in a line before Caillean.

  Marged, the eldest, bent reverently. “Welcome back to us, Lady of Avalon.” She stopped, her eyes resting on the lanky form of Gawen. For a moment she was literally speechless. Caillean could almost hear the question on the girl’s lips.

  “This is Gawen. He is to live here. Will you speak to the Druids and find a place for him for tonight?”

  “Gladly, Lady,” she said in a whisper, without taking her eyes from Gawen, who was blushing furiously. Caillean sighed; if the very sight of a male child—for even now she simply could not think of Gawen as a young man—had this effect on her younger charges, her attempts to counteract the prejudices they had brought with them from the Forest House had a ways to go. His presence among the girls might be good for them.

  Someone else was standing behind the maidens. For a moment she thought one of the older priestesses, perhaps Eiluned or Riannon, had come down to welcome her. But the newcomer was too small. She caught a glimpse of dark hair; then the figure moved past the others into plain view.

  Caillean blinked. A stranger, she thought, and then blinked again, for the woman seemed suddenly both completely at home and utterly familiar, as if Caillean must have known her from the beginning of the world. But she could not quite call to mind when, if ever, she had set eyes on her before, or who she might be.

  The newcomer was not looking at Caillean at all. Her eyes, which were dark and clear, were fastened on Gawen. Caillean wondered suddenly why she had thought the strange woman little, for she herself was a tall woman, and now the other seemed taller still. Her hair, which was dark and long, was fastened in the same way as that of the priestesses, in a single braid at her back, but she was clad in a garment of deerskin, and about her temples a narrow garland of scarlet berries was strung.

  She looked at Gawen, and then she bowed down to the ground.

  “Son of a Hundred Kings,” she said, “be welcome to Avalon….”

  Gawen looked at her in astonishment.

  Caillean cleared her throat, fighting for words. “Who are you and what do you want from me?” she asked brusquely.

  “With you, nothing, now,” the woman said, just as shortly, “and you do not need to know my name. My business is with Gawen. But you have long known me, Blackbird, although you do not remember.”

  Blackbird…“Lon-dubh” in the Hibernian tongue. At the sound of the name which had been hers as a child, about which she had not even thought for almost forty years, Caillean fell abruptly silent.

  Once more she could feel the ache of bruises and the pain between her thighs, and worse still the sense of filth, and shame. The man who raped her had threatened to kill her if she told what he had done. It had seemed to her then that only the sea could make her clean once more. She had pushed through the brambles at the cliff edge, heedless of the thorns that tore her skin, intending to throw herself into the waves that frothed around the fanged rocks below.

  And suddenly the shadow between the briars had become a woman, no taller than herself but incomparably stronger, who had held her, murmuring, with a tenderness her own mother had never had the energy to show, and called her by her childhood name. She must have fallen asleep at last, still cradled in the Lady’s arms. When she awoke, her body had been cleansed, the worst of her hurts become a distant ache and the memory of terror an evil dream.

  “Lady—” she whispered. Years later, her studies with the Druids had enabled her to give the being who had saved her a name. But the fairy woman’s attention was fixed on Gawen.

  “My Lord, I will guide you to your destiny. Wait for me at the water’s edge, and one day soon I will come for you.” She bowed again, not quite so deeply this time, and suddenly, as if she had never been there at all, was gone.

  Caillean closed her eyes. The instinct which had guided her to bring Gawen to Avalon had been a good one. If the Lady of the Fairy Folk honored him, he must indeed have a purpose here. Eilan had met the Merlin once in vision. What had he promised her? Roman though he was, this boy’s father had died as a Year-King, to save the people. What did that mean? For a moment she nearly understood Eilan’s sacrifice.

  A choked sound from Gawen brought her back to the present. He was white as chalk.

  “Who was she? Why did she speak to me?”

  Marged looked from Caillean to the boy, brows lifting, and the priestess wondered suddenly if the others had seen anything at all.

  Caillean said, “She is the Lady of the Elder Folk—those who are called Faerie. She saved my life once, long ago. In these days the Elder Folk come not often among humankind, and she would not have appeared here without reason. But as for why—I do not know.”


  “She bowed to me.” He swallowed, then asked in a quenched whisper, “Will you permit me to go, foster-mother?”

  “Permit you? I would not dare to prevent it. You must be ready when she comes for you.”

  He looked up at her, a glint in those clear grey eyes that reminded her suddenly of Eilan. “I have no choice, then. But I will not go with her unless she answers me!”

  “Lady, I would never question your judgment,” said Eiluned, “but what possessed you to bring a man-child that age here?”

  Caillean took a swallow of water from her hornwood beaker and set it down on the dining table with a sigh. In the six moons since the priestesses had first come to Avalon, it sometimes seemed to her that the younger woman had done nothing but question her decisions. She wondered if Eiluned deceived even herself with her show of humility. She was only thirty, but she seemed older, thin and frowning and always busy about everyone else’s affairs. Still, she was conscientious, and had become a useful deputy.

  The other women, recognizing the tone, looked away and went back to their meal. The long hall at the foot of the Tor had seemed ample when the Druids built it for them at the beginning of the summer. But once word of the new House of Maidens had spread, more girls had come to them, and Caillean thought they might have to extend the hall before another summer went by.

  “The Druids take boys for training at an even younger age,” she said evenly. Firelight flickered on the smooth planes of Gawen’s face, making him look momentarily older.

  “Then let them take him! He does not belong here….” She glared at the boy, who glanced at Caillean for reassurance before taking another spoonful of millet and beans. Dica and Lysanda, the youngest of her maidens, giggled until Gawen grew red and looked away.

  “For the present I have arranged with Cunomaglos for him to lodge with old Brannos, the bard. Will that content you?” she asked acidly.