Part 19 (1/2)

And then Constantius left Britannia, and I learned the true meaning of despair. Lying with curtains drawn in my bedchamber I refused to rise and dress myself, and neither Drusilla's most delicate recipes nor Hrodlind's pleading could persuade me to eat. For most of a week I lay, accepting no company but that of Hylas, who was now grown so old that he spent his days dozing by the brazier, though when I was in the house he still insisted on following me from room to room. I rejoiced in my growing weakness, for though I had promised Constantius I would not take my life, this gentle slide into oblivion seemed a welcome surcease to my suffering.

And as weakness loosed the fetters of my mind, a vision came.

It seemed to me that I was wandering in a misty landscape like the borders of Avalon. I had come to confront the G.o.ddess, to learn the next step in my own pa.s.sage, to go beyond the Mother and meet the Crone. Before, I could never see beyond the Mother, who must be the central face of the G.o.ddess, and the two on either side, Nymph and Crone, only Her handmaidens.

But what I was enduring now was the ultimate childbirth, the ultimate test of strength and courage. Now, confronting my own transition from the status of motherhood, I was forced to see the world-tragedy of mothers. Even Jesus, according to the Christians, had a mother, and again and again and again I saw him leaning on her arm, and when life deserted and defeated him he cried out to her too. I said, ”Just like a man; he went on and died bravely and left the women to put his work together again afterwards.” Fear for my own son overwhelmed me and I cried bitterly, ”Does the Mother have to let her children go just to be crucified?”

I asked what was beyond. Again and again I received only the sense of being a s.h.i.+p's figurehead cleaving water towards the unknown.

Then I seemed to perceive woman's central tragedy. I had lost my own mother before I could even know her, and was left alone, lost, desperate, crying out for comfort. It was a situation in which we women continue to find ourselves lifelong. We are forced to lend strength to men, to bear and feed our own children. Outsiders saw me as strong, but I was a child crying in the dark for comfort and my mother had gone away and would never be there for me again.

And then the twist of the knife. Before I was barely old enough to stand alone, before I had had time or strength to know who I was, a smaller hand had been tucked into mine and the Voice had said, ”Here.

This is your little cousin. Look after her.”

And this is the confrontation with Life, the first awareness that perhaps we should cry out, ”No,” and strike down that little form and batter it until it lies dead and cold and no longer demanding, and run on free, untrammelled, shouting, ”Mother, wait, there's only me.”

Or else we must make the other choice, being deprived of the Mother, tobecome the mother, and pick up the little one when she falls down, and wipe away her tears, and rock her to sleep, clinging together against the dark because she is as much in need of comfort as you, and you are the stronger so it is yours to give...

And that, I realized as the bright images misted away, was what I had done, first for Becca and Dierna, and later for a succession of maidservants and soldiers' wives and junior officers in my husband's command. And for Teleri, though I had failed her, at the last.

And then I realized that someone was with me in the room. I had left strict orders that I was not to be disturbed, but I was too weak now even for anger. I opened my eyes.

Teleri was sitting beside my bed, slumped a little in the chair, as if she had been there for some time. In her lap she held a bowl of porridge. It still steamed, and the scent brought back memories of the Hall of the Priestesses on a frosty morning, when we had all gathered to eat our daymeal around the central fire.

It was this scent, I realized, that had brought me back from my vision, the fragrance of porridge with honey and dried apples as they made it in Aval on.

”Your servants dared not trouble you,” she said softly, ”but I will not add to the sins I already bear that of letting you die when there is something I can do.”

I reached out for the bleak security of despair, but my stomach was growling. Apparently my body had decided to live, and it was no use arguing. With a sigh, I held out my hand for the bowl.

”When you are well,” said Teleri, ”I will leave you. I am going back to Avalon. I should never have left it, and if Dierna casts me out, I will wander until death takes me in the Mist between the worlds.”

That was what I had been doing, I thought grimly, and without the trouble of travelling to the Summer Country, but it seemed to me that I had lost the right to criticize.

”Come with me, Helena. I do not know your story, but it is clear that you are a priestess of Avalon.”

I swallowed a bite of porridge, considering. Had I been forgotten already? Ganeda might well have been bitter enough to erase my name from the rolls of priestesses. But perhaps the explanation was simpler.

”When I dwelt on the Holy Isle I was called Eilan,” I said slowly, and saw her eyes widen.

”You are the one who ran away with a Roman officer! Not since the days of the first Eilan who was High Priestess at Vernemeton has there been such a scandal. But Dierna said that you were kind to her when she was a little child, and always spoke well of you. Is your Roman dead, then? Your servants do not speak about him.”

”Not dead, except to me,” I said through stiff lips. ”He is Constantius Chlorus, the father of my son Constantine.”

Teleri's eyes filled with tears. ”I was married to Carausius, who was a good man though I could never love him, and to Allectus, whom I did love, though he was good neither for Britannia nor for me.”

”This was Dierna's will?” In the end, it would seem that Ganeda had trained her grand-daughter well.

”She wanted to bind the Defender of Britannia to Avalon.”

I nodded, understanding that this was the same hope that had originally sent me out to seek Constantius.

”Dierna is a great priestess, however badly things turned out for me,” Teleri said earnestly. ”I am sure that she would welcome you-”

And then attempt to use me, all for the good of Avalon, I thought bitterly. Once, I might have had as good a claim to be Lady of the Holy Isle as she, but I had been away too long, and though Constantius had abandoned me, his son, whose last letter lay even now on the table beside my bed, had more need of my counsel than the priestesses of Avalon.

”To Dierna, and to her only, you may say that I still live, and that I send my love to her. But I think that the G.o.ddess may still have work for me in the world.”

A week later, when I came down to breakfast, they told me that Teleri had gone. She had what was left from the money I had given her to buy clothing, and all I could do for her now was to ask the blessing of the Lady upon her journeying.

Spring had come to Londinium. The Tamesis ran high with rainfall and new leaves were springing from every branch, welcoming the returning birds. Life returned to my limbs, and suddenly I needed to be outside, walking through the pastures and along the stream that divided the city. At other times I would go past the forum and over to the baths, or farther still, to the Temple of Isis that had been built near the western gates to the town. With each day I grew stronger, and less content to sulk at home, brooding on my misery. I missed the patter of paws at my heels, but as soon as I began to recover, Hylas had died, as if he felt his duty was now done. He had lived a long time for a dog, but I could not bring myself to get another.

A stone-carver had his workshop between the Isaeum and the Temple of Diana, and I conceived the idea of commissioning from him a relief of thematronae , the trio of ancestral mothers who were honoured all over the Empire. But it had come to me that my carving should be different, and so in addition to the usual three figures, two of them holding baskets of fruit and the third a child, I asked the sculptor to carve a fourth Mother, this one holding in her lap a dog.

Perhaps the Mothers were grateful, for within a moon, I met three people who were to make a profound difference in my life during the remaining years I spent in Londinium.

I encountered the first immediately after finis.h.i.+ng negotiations over the carving. I had set out in search of a cookshop where I could have a bit of bread and sausage before starting home. But as I turned the comer, I nearly tripped over something furry, and looking down, found myself surrounded by cats. If this was an omen, I did not understand it. There must have been two dozen, of all shapes and colours, waiting impatiently in front of a rather ramshackle building that had been added on to the back of the Temple of Isis.

I heard a ripple of words in some foreign tongue, turned and saw a small, round woman draped in several tunicas and a palla of brightly clas.h.i.+ng colours, and leaning on a cane. Dark hair was partly covered by windings of purple, and she was carrying a basket that smelled strongly of fish even from here.

She looked up and saw me. ”Oh I am sorry,” she said in Latin. ”They get very insistent, the greedy p.u.s.s.es, but I am the only one who will feed them, you see.”

As she opened the bag and began to dole out fish heads I could see that her dark eyes had been elongated with kohl, and her skin had a warm glow that had never come from a British sun. Around her neck hung a pendant of a cat in the Egyptian style.

”Are you a priestess?” I asked.

”I am Katiya, and I serve the Lady Bast-” She started to touch one hand to her forehead in homage, realized that she was holding a piece of fish, laughed, and cast it to a big orange tomcat who waited to one side.

”Eastward we gaze upon Bast, the Queen-Cat,” she chanted softly. ”In the east we seek for the soul of Isis, Light-bearer, Moon-mother, gentle protectress. To the shrine of Per-Bast we direct our prayers...

But I am the only one in Londinium who does so,” she added, shaking her head. ”In Egypt all people know that the cat is sacred to the G.o.ddess, but merchants bring cats to Britannia and leave them, and no one seems to care. Only the priests of Isis let me stay here because they know that Bast and Isis are sisters. I do what I can.”

”My G.o.ddess favours dogs,” I told her, ”but I suppose that Bast isher sister as well. Will you accept an offering?”

”In my Lady's name,” she answered, and from amongst her draperies fetched out a net bag, somewhat less redolent of fish than the basket, into which I could drop a few coins. ”I feed my little ones, and I make songs. Come to me when you are sad, n.o.ble lady, and I will cheer you.”

”I think it very likely you will!” I answered, laughing in spite of myself. And thereafter, for as long as I lived in Londinium, I would visit Katiya every week or so and make my offering. Just to keep the scales balanced, however, I made a donation to the Temple of Diana, who loves hounds, for the care of the city's stray dogs. From time to time I would take one of these foundlings home with me, but though I enjoyed the patter of paws about the house, with none of them did I find the bond I had had with Hylas and Eldri.

The second meeting occurred one day when I noticed the name ”Corinthius” on a sign above a door and paused, remembering the old Greek who had been my tutor when I was a child. From inside I could hear the sound of young voices declining Greek verbs. Corinthius had told me he intended to set up a school. I asked Philip, who was with me, to knock and enquire, and soon I was taking wine with a young man who told me he was the son of my old tutor, who had married when he got to Londinium, and begotten this son to eventually inherit his school.

”Oh yes, my lady, my father often spoke of you,” said Corinthius the Younger. Crooked teeth showed as he grinned. ”He used to say that you were brighter than any boy he ever taught, especially when I had not done well at my lessons.”

I could not help smiling in answer. ”He was a good teacher. I wish I could have studied with him longer, but I was lucky my father believed a girl-child should be educated at all.” I did not tell him that my studies with the old Greek had been followed by a much more extensive education at Avalon.

”Oh indeed,” Corinthius nodded. ”I am so sorry sometimes, when I see my lads with their sisters, that I am not able to teach the girls as well. I think that some of their parents would be willing, but they do not like to send their girls to a male teacher, and of course there are not so many educated women here as in Rome or Alexandria...” He poured more wine.

”Do you know,” I said eventually. ”I have always wished that I had a daughter, to whom I could pa.s.s on some of the things I know. You might suggest to the mothers of some of these hoys who have sisters that they pay a call on me. My husband left me with enough to live on, but I find myself a little lonely, and would welcome a... circle... of friends.”

”You will be like Sappho in the meadows of Lesbos,” exclaimed Corinthius, ”beloved of the G.o.ds!”