Tales of Avalon Read online

  “I heard your name in the marshes,” was the reply, “and I have come seeking you.”

  “But what is your name?” asked Morwyn. “I cannot feel it.”

  The creature smiled. “I am Enaid,” she said. “I am a Woman.”

  ~

  For many days Enaid stayed with Morwyn on Ynys y Cysgodion. She had come from the east, she said, where the lands were high and the earth was dry. She had heard rumors of a dark lady who lived alone, among the folk of the ancient marshes, and whom some said was the giver of life.

  They sat together under the old alder drinking a tea of marsh herbs. “For years we have heard the tales of Morwyn,” she said, “Though the people of my clan call you Vivian, for we believe you are the giver of life.”

  This new name sought a resting place deep within Morwyn’s being. But she let it remain quiet, more intrigued by other parts of Enaid’s story. She had never seen another human before, did not know she was human herself now, and was curious to hear there were others, somewhere out beyond the marshes.

  “Clan?” Morwyn asked. “Is that like a flock of Graylag Geese that gather in the marshes?”

  Enaid laughed. “Indeed it is” she said. “And sometimes they make as much noise when they are all gathered together!” She sipped her tea and leaned back against the alder trunk. “It is so quiet here. And safe.” Enaid told her tales of giant animals called mammoth and aurochs, and winters of ice. Of long migrations in search of food. Of men who hunted game, who fought with each other, who gathered women to them. And of a way of begetting that was strange to Morwyn.

  The tales stirred currents of unrest in Morwyn’s spirit. “These ‘men’ sound like our tales of marsh monsters,” she said. And a shiver went through her body as if from the cold lands of Enaid’s tales.

  “Sometimes they are.” Enaid looked over her tea gourd into the distance, seeing beyond the marshes to the high eastern land that was her home. “But on cold nights it is good to have company, and warmth.”

  “Company?” Morwyn asked.

  Enaid looked into the eyes of the Dark Lady and saw loneliness. “Someone to be with you,” she said.

  Morwyn stood and stretched her arms out to the waters. “The marshes are filled with company,” she said. A marsh hen roused itself from a reed tussock and flew; Morwyn called in greeting.

  Enaid came to Morwyn and circled her arms around the Lady’s waist from behind in a gentle hug. Softly, she kissed the back of Morwyn’s neck. “Like this,” she said. “There is another kind of company, Morwyn.”

  For the first time in all the long ages tears ran down Morwyn’s cheeks. At last she understood she had become truly human, and was completely alone. The two women sat together at the base of the old tree, all forgotten but the warmth of the other’s presence and the gentleness of enfolding arms.

  The marshes have always rejoiced in my presence, Morwyn thought, But they do not need me. So Morwyn learned the heartlonging that would one day be known as love, and the need for the nearness of another of one’s kind. In the presence of Enaid she became Vivian, for both were givers of life.

  After several cycles of the moon Enaid left and returned to her own lands in the east. Vivian, who had been Lady since before the memory of times, did not again depart from the dark waters of Llyn y Cysgodion. She became a memory, and finally a rumor. But it was always her spirit that enlivened the marshes at their heart. One day others would come after her, who would journey beyond the borders of the ancient dark. But they are a part of other tales.

  Chapter Eight

  III. Doeth and The Marsh Sedge

  Before the first memories of the marsh folk, the vast Brythonic sea began to withdraw, leaving shallow waters, fens and marshes in the broad levels between the Mendydd Hills and the Pwlborfa. Marsh reeds grew in abundance, and died, forming peat in raised bogs. On the borders of bog and marsh, in the wet black mud, grew the great sedge meadows. There the Dwrtrygydd came to be, the water people. And life for them was as sharp as the sedge.

  ~

  Heavy gray clouds hung low over the marsh. It was raining, as it had been steadily all morning. Gobaith and Dyfrgi paddled their marshboat to the edge of the flooded sedge meadow that bordered the south side of Ynys Calchfaen. The meadows were growing. For countless cycles of the sun, Gobaith’s ancestors had lived on the islands in the great marsh. The waters had always been unpredictable. At times they had become a wide shallow sea, engulfing many of the smaller islands. Then the people would retreat, sometimes for many generations, to the highlands of the Mendydds or Pwlborfa. But they were not a land-loving people and, when they could, they returned to the water. Throughout Gobaith’s life the waters had been low and the marshes rich with life. Ynys Calchfaen had remained dry, home to several clans who raised sufficient sheep and pigs to barter a few for grain from the mainland. They traded pottery for tools and trinkets of bronze, copper, and tin. Gobaith’s father had been a weaver, producing coarse wool cloth which, heavily oiled, kept one relatively warm and dry when hunting and fishing in the marshes. But the waters were rising once again; much of Ynys Calchfaen had been lost to the marsh. The clans had to move most of the livestock across the wooden trackways to pasture and stables on Crib Pwlborfa. And in the areas between island and marsh the sedge meadows were growing. Gobaith pulled his wet woolen cloak closer about his neck and stepped out into the shallow water and muck. He hated the sedge. It grew in dense tussocks in the black, waterlogged earth. To step in between meant sinking sometimes up to the knee, inviting encounters with leeches. To step on the tussocks risked deep, painful cuts from the sharp spikes that grew on each sedge stalk.

  “Keep your hands in the boat, Dyfrgi,” he warned. Gobaith’s young son of four summers sat in the back of the marshboat, wrapped in a wool blanket. In the summer he would be reaching for butterflies and Gobaith would worry he might grab a handful of sedge. But in the cold rain of year’s end there was no danger of the young lad wanting to escape the warmth of his wrap. Instead he laughed, and urged his father to pull faster, as Gobaith drew the flat bottomed boat into meadow.

  Dragging a boat through the southern sedge meadow was not the usual way to approach Ynys Calchfaen. Ordinarily Gobaith would have returned from fishing to the north coast, where channels of open water led through the marsh to the island at several points. It was at these landing points that the families of Gobaith’s clan had their huts. But the fishing had not gone well that day. After sitting in the rain for what seemed like ages and catching only a few small pike, Gobaith decided to try his luck with bigger game. Once in a while a roe deer would stray too far out into the bogs from Crib Pwlborfa and become mired in the sedge meadow, weakened from struggling in the muck, losing blood from the deep sedge cuts. Gobaith prayed to the goddess of the marsh for luck. But the rain came down harder, and he cursed when he stumbled and grabbed a handful of sedge to steady himself. Prayers and curses often mingled in Gobaith’s heart in those days; neither seemed to move the gods to stem the rising waters. In spite of the pain, Gobaith grinned. I ought to have worried about me rather than Dyfrgi, he thought.

  He moved slowly forward, pulling the boat behind, stepping on the tussocks because he preferred to lose blood honourably to the sedge than have it sucked from him by the horrid leeches. A shiver went through him at the thought of their fat, slimy bodies . . .

  Gobaith was almost upon the roe buck before he saw it, maybe about thirty paces away. In the summer sunshine he would have seen it clear across the meadow, its russet coat flashing against the green sedge. But its winter gray matched everything around. It was nearly invisible. He dropped his rope and moved back to his son,

  “Hush, Dyfrgi,” he whispered, pointing to the buck that was still struggling to free itself from the muck. “The goddess has blessed us. We will eat well tonight.”

  Dyfrgi’s eyes went wide. He had been on hunts with his father before, and he knew what was coming. “Can I help, Tada?” he asked with excitement.

  “S
hhh. Here, take this.” Gobaith handed him a blanket roll from the front of the boat, then turned his back and bent over for the boy to climb on. “Jump up, lad,” he said. “And mind the sedge spikes.”

  Together they approached the mired buck, being careful not to startle it badly enough that it should leap free. When they drew near they could see the animal was badly frightened. It stood still, eyes wide with fear, shudders rippling through its tensed muscles. It made one more attempt at a leap, but the muck held it fast. Red blood ran down its legs from the sedge cuts.

  Gobaith could feel his son’s rapid breathing on his neck, nearly matching the rhythm of the buck’s tremors. It was a small roe, not as tall as his waist. But it still had its summer weight. This would be a good catch. He stepped forward, slowly taking the blanket roll from his son. “Ho, there, Iwrch,” he said, as if calling the creature by name. The deer struggle again and let out its barking cry of distress. “Easy, Iwrch, easy.” In one movement he threw the blanket over the animal’s head and, as sudden blindness confused it into stillness, he drew his long iron knife and slit its throat. Blood flowed from the wound, steaming in the cool air, and the buck lay dead.

  “Now,” he said, as he swung his son down to stand by the carcass, “you can help me get him ready to take home.”

  “Tada, why did you throw the blanket over the deer’s head?”

  “The gods will that we eat their creatures in order to live,” my son. “They give them into our hands, and they grant us skill to have a successful hunt.” He put his hand on the boy’s head and Dyfrgi looked up at him. “But it is up to us alone, little one, to show a bit of kindness.”

  ~

  That evening Gobaith and Doeth stood side by side on the bank of Llyn y Aberthau, their son Dyfrgi between them. Several other clan members made a solemn semicircle, all facing the lake of offerings. Doeth lifted a long bronze knife blade, old, but smoothed and polished to look like new. It glowed softly in the rays of the full moon.

  “Goddess of the waters,” she called, “Goddess of the marshes, hear our prayers . . .”

  Gobaith was impatient. It would be good to include the goddess of the sedge meadows too, he thought.

  “Mother, we call upon you to still the rising of your waters,” Doeth continued. “Spare our home of Ynys Calchfaen, and the islands of the other clans across the marshes.” She held her arms out over the waters of Llyn y Aberthau and reverently let go of the blade. It dropped into the water almost without sound, and the water accepted it from her hands in expanding ripples with the brightness of the moon reflected at their center. All was quiet.

  Our women have performed this ritual every full moon since I can remember, thought Gobaith. As their mothers did before them, and their grandmothers’ mothers before that. There is more silver and bronze at the bottom of Aberthau than in all the homes of our people, yet still the waters rise.

  And still the waters did rise. Ynys Calchfaen grew ever smaller, while more and more of the Dwrtrygydds were forced to make it their home. Isle after isle was inundated. Ynys Llefrith and Ynys Burtle were already gone, as was Ynys y Llynhydd across the marsh. Nearby Ynys Bragwair was no longer habitable, useful only for keeping sheep in summer. Of the isles remaining, only Calchfaen was available to the clans. The great Ynys Mawr to the north was held by the tribes of the Mendydds. Ynys y Niwl, where no one lived, was rumored to harbor strange things in its mists. And Cysgodion: older rumors told of an isle of shadows hidden somewhere in the north marshes that was home to the Lady of the waters. But no one had ever found it.

  The ritual was over and the clan members were drifting back to their huts. Gobaith hoped for a good night’s rest. In the morning he would help to sink new pilings to raise the Chweg trackway out of the water.

  ~

  A fine mist came from the gray sky as Doeth sat by the shore of Llyn y Aberthau. Countless marked the fall of tiny droplets of rain. rippled in a gentle breeze from the northwest. Several curlews circled overhead, calling to one another their plaintive cour-lee, cour-lee, then headed out over the eastern sedge meadow toward the marsh. Doeth sat on the large gray rock from which offerings were dropped into the waters. All around her was water. The lake, the grass, the sedge and marsh, the sky, her long dark hair and woolen cloak; all were wet, cold, and uniformly gray. Waters fell from the gray sky, mists rose from the gray sea. Doeth was caught in the middle.

  "We have been making offerings to you for countless cycles of the moon," Doeth said aloud, looking out over the lake. "Yet you do not answer, and the waters rise. What are we to do, Goddess? How are we to live?" No sound answered her but the hiss of falling rain on the lake surface. "No, I did not suppose you would answer." She sighed, looking up into the interlocking circles

  The whole surface clouds, falling rain mixing with her tears. Finally she rose and took the path that skirted the huts of her clan on its way to the north shore of the island. There marsh and sedge meadow framed the one short stretch of open shoreline, where the clan moored their marshboats. The sedge was spreading, the only living thing, it seemed to her, with the tenacity to survive in a world becoming more water than land.

  There were the curlews again, swooping over the wet meadow. They were well suited to the sedge, she realized. Their long, curving bills were made for probing the soft mud, where they found crabs, mollusks, and lugworms. But even the curlews needed the drier moors and fields higher up on the island for breeding. Soon they, too, would leave Ynys Calchfaen for higher ground.

  "Would you give us curlew-wings, my Lady?" Doeth asked. "We could fly then across the rising waters."

  Silence.

  "No, I suppose not."

  She sat on the bottom of an overturned boat, gazing into the distance. In front of her the open water lapped the shore in gentle waves. To her right, sedge meadow gave way to marsh. Beyond that she could just see the suggestion of Ynys y Niwl, the upper reaches of its high hill lost in low hanging clouds. What shadows dwelt on that strange island, she wondered?

  Several boat lengths out in the water she could see the top of a pole that in drier times had been well up on land, and used to secure her husband’s beached boat. Perhaps out of habit, he often still tied it there and wadded in to shore. The boat sat there now, rocking slowly, turning in the current. Not much of the pole stood above the water. It was about mid-day. The full moon of last night would be about half way between its setting and its rising, so the tide was high. She watched the boat bob up and down, its slack tie rope letting it wander a bit from the mooring . . .

  Suddenly she realized she had been staring at the boat for some time, and she blinked rainmist from her eyes. There was something about the boat, something that seemed important. But whatever it was eluded her as if it had vanished in the mist. Time to think about an evening meal. Gobaith would be famished when he came home from working on the trackway.

  ~

  “Indeed it was hell, Doe,” Gobaith said, stretching the aching muscles in his arms. They were seated on furs around a central fire in the hut where he was finishing the last of a deer haunch. He laughed and ruffled Dyfrgi’s damp hair. “I kept the lad out of the water because we were in the sedge,” he said. “But he was a great help to Gwrol carrying the ash poles to us along the walkway.”

  Doeth smiled at the boy. “You will be manly yourself soon enough,” she said. The boy beamed with pride.

  Gobaith wiped his arm on his mouth and drank some honeyed water. “Gwrol supplied us with enough poles from the ash coppices to raise a hundred paces of trackway,” he said, “mostly at the edge of the sedge meadow.” He rubbed at the bandage on his left leg where Doeth had cleaned and covered his cuts with a salve of chamomile.

  The Chweg trackway ran from the south side of Ynys Calchfaen through sedge and bog to the north shore of Crib Pwlborfa. Most of the cattle and sheep had been moved over it to the ridge some time ago. On the ridge, below the slopes of the hills, oak and ash were grown to maintain the Chweg and other trackways of the marshe
s. So it had been for time out of mind. No one in Gobaith’s clan knew when the tracks had first been built, but remains of old sections were often found buried in the black mud. They must have been ancient. Some of the trackways were nearly a day’s journey in length. They were built mostly of crossed ash poles sunk into the mud, with oak planks laid end to end upon the crossed poles. A grove of ash trees on Pwlborfa was kept coppiced, cut nearly to the ground on a regular basis, to produce the long, curved poles needed for the supports.

  That day, Gobaith and several others had raised twenty sections of trackway above the floodwater level by pounding new supports into the mud and pulling out the old ones. It was wet work, and cold at that time of year. But Gobaith preferred the cold to the biting gnats of warmer seasons. The problem with the trackways was that they were anchored in the mud. As the water level rose, and more of the raised bog reverted to marsh, deeper water threatened the usefulness of the wooden paths.

  A shadow crossed Gobaith’s face. “We are using the longest poles we can now,” he said. “It won’t be long before the Chweg track sinks below the water. Then likely we will have to leave Calchfaen.”

  Doeth had often used the tracks. In her mind she saw the poles anchored firmly in the mud, the unmoving oaken boards gradually reached, and then overcome, by the rising water. She thought of Gobaith’s moored boat, bobbing on the tide.

  Doeth.

  It was as if someone had called her name. But no one was with her in the hut except Gobaith and Dyfrgi, and they had gone back to finishing their meal.

  Doeth. It was the soft, deep voice of an old woman. Doeth, think of Gobaith’s boat.

  Without a word, Doeth stood and left the hut. Gobaith and Dyfrgi were too busy with deer bones to notice. Outside it had grown dark. The rain clouds had passed over with a chill northwest breeze. Stars shone overhead, the Hunter and the Sisters in clear view. Doeth followed the narrow path down to the moorings, visible in the light of the newly waning moon. She reached the shore and sat again on the overturned boat. The tide had gone out, leaving the old boat much higher up on shore than her earlier visit. There was Gobaith’s boat, still bobbing in the water, just a bit offshore. Its tie rope now hung above it from the mooring pole which stood high above the water level.