Part 31 (1/2)
I had looked forwards to seeing what more than twenty years had done to the city, but that morning I was having trouble with my breathing, and I thought it best to stay indoors with Crispa to bear me company.
”Avia, who are the pretty ladies?” Crispa pointed at the relief of the fourmatronae which I had commissioned so long ago. It was one of the few decorations that had survived my absence, perhaps because it was bolted to the wall.
I took a careful breath, then turned. ”They are the Mothers.”
”Look! One of them has a dog!”
Leviyah stood up, tail wagging, at the word.
”Not you, silly!” exclaimed Crispa, reaching up to pat the carven flank of the hound in the lap of the third figure in the frieze. ”And one has a baby, and the other two have fruit and a loaf of bread. Are they G.o.ddesses?”
”They are the G.o.ddess-but She has many faces, as many faces as there are mothers in the world, and when they grow old and leave their bodies to pa.s.s over to the Otherworld they continue to watch over their children...”
I had tried to keep my voice calm, but Crispa was a sensitive child, and she climbed into my lap and put her arms around my neck.
”Avia, will you always watch over me?”
As I hugged her, I felt an ache in my throat, and knew it was not caused by shortness of breath, but unshed tears.
That night my illness reached a crisis. Gasping for breath, I saw terror in the faces of Cunoarda and Lena, and could not comfort them.
”Shall I send for a priest?” asked Cunoarda anxiously.
I managed a bark of laughter. ”What use? I have already been buried! You heard the funeral oration Bishop Sylvester gave!” Then I began to cough again.
At the height of my paroxysms I would have welcomed death gladly, and continued to fight only because the two women begged me not to leave them alone.
A little after midnight, the mint-scented steam with which Cunoarda filled the room began to relieve me, and I was able to drink some comfrey tea. At length I fell into a state halfway between sleep and waking, cradled against Lena's breast.
During the crisis, I had raged against my weakness, unready to go into the night. But now, I realized that in our old age, what we lose in infancy is miraculously given back. Instead of crying in the dark for the mother who abandoned us before we were able to stand alone, now, with children and kindred having come and gone, we are free. In our darker moments we feel ourselves wholly alone, weak, aged. But in the end the Mother is given back to us and we are reborn, going back to infancy, lying in trust on the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of our daughters...
Everything is taken from us, even G.o.d; we spend ourself to the death. And then the G.o.ddess comes back to us. Frombecoming the G.o.ddess, the mother, we havecreated the G.o.ddess in our daughters, our sisters, as we turn to Her, knowing that even if we must die still not knowing anything else, we die in Her arms and on Her breast.
But I did not die. Waking to the clear light of morning in Lena's arms, I took a deep breath and rejoiced as the life-giving air filled my lungs. Nonetheless, I was desperately weak, and I could feel my heart bound in my breast. For the first time I faced the possibility that this body might fail me before I reached my goal.
I remembered times during my illnesses when death would have been a welcome release. At other moments I had called on the teachings of Avalon to counter my panicked fear. I had reason to believe that death was only a pa.s.sage from one kind of existence to another, but I had still dreaded the moment of transition. Now, however, I realized that my fears were not for myself but for those I would leave behind me.
”You are awake!” Lena exclaimed as she felt me stir. ”And you are better, thank the G.o.ds!”
”For now, but if I do not recover, I must tell you how to get to Avalon.”
Lena's cheeks grew pink with embarra.s.sment. ”Do you mean it is a real place? I thought you were speaking as the poets do, to describe the safety we would find in Britannia.”
I opened my mouth to correct her, then closed it, realizing how deeply ingrained was the prohibition against telling outsiders of the sacred isle.
”It is real, though... difficult... to attain. It lies in the land called the Summer Country. There is a vale between two lines of hills, so low that when the rivers are in flood or the winter storms back up the tides the water covers it, and any bit of higher ground becomes an island. And there is one such, crowned by a pointed tor, that is called Inis Witrin.
”When you reach it, do not go to the monks who have their little church at the base of the Tor, but stop at the village of the fisherfolk who live in the marshes, and tell them that you are Eilan's grand-daughter, and you wish to be taken to Avalon.”
She looked dubious, and I sighed, for in truth, I could not even guarantee thatI would be admitted after so many years. And was I justified in taking Lena there? This vital young woman, whose cheeks were glowing despite the shadows a difficult night had painted beneath her eyes, was a very different creature from the fragile and frightened girl I had helped to escape from Treveri almost two months ago.
”The holy isle is a refuge where no king or emperor can follow. But you are not required to go there. If you and Crispa take new names, I think it likely that you will be able to live in perfect safety here in Londinium.”
The winged brows drew down. ”Don't you want us to come with you?”
”Lena, do you not understand how I have come to love you? That is why the choice must be yours. I only know thatI have to go there, or try.”
I recovered slowly, and it was October before I was strong enough to attempt the journey. The carriage in which we had travelled from Dubris was fitted with a soft mattress and loaded with provisions. But before departing Londinium there was one last task.
I had seen how swiftly, with Constantine's favour, Christianity was becoming the religion of the Empire. I could foresee a time when its shrines and symbols would displace those of the old religion entirely, reinventing Britannia as a Christian land. In the time that was coming, there would be few to understand that it was possible to honour both the G.o.ddess and the G.o.d.
It pained me to think that my carving of the Mothers might one day be mocked by folk who no longer saw it as holy. And so workmen were summoned to remove it from the wall and load it into a barrow, and in the night, when the men had gone home, Lena and Cunoarda pulled it to the stream that ran through the fields behind my dwelling, and tipped the carving in. Hidden in its depths, the Mothers would bless the city through which its waters ran.
”Tell me about when you were a little girl on Avalon...” Crispa had elected to ride for a while inside the carriage with Cunoarda and me, though I knew she would want to sit with Lena, who was driving, before long.
”I had a white dog called Eldri-”
”Like Leviyah?” Crispa pulled back the curtain to point to the dog who was trotting beside us, head up to catch all the scents of this new land.
”Smaller, with curly fur. A boy at the Lake village gave her to me, and said she was a faerie dog, and I think it was true, because she guided me once to a land even farther from this world than Avalon, and brought me safely back again.”
Cunoarda's lips quirked, and I could see that she thought I was telling the child a fairy story. I found it strange that she, who had been born in Alba, found it harder to believe in Avalon than Lena, the child of a thoroughly Romanized Gallic aristocracy. But perhaps Cunoarda still needed the walls she had erected to protect her from the pain of her loss, and did not dare. I knew that she had found great comfort in Christianity, and when we were in Londinium, she had attended the rituals at the Church of Saint Pancras which I had long ago endowed.
”Did you have other girls to play with?”
”I lived in the House of Maidens,” I answered, remembering the murmur of girls' voices in the darkness with a sudden overwhelming clarity. ”I had a little cousin called Dierna, with hair as red as Cunoarda's. I believe that Dierna is the Lady of Avalon now.”
I realized with a flutter of anxiety that I did not know. I remembered dreaming Ganeda's funeral-would I not know it if Dierna, whom I had loved, had also died?
If she was gone, there might well be no one left at Avalon who remembered me.
After we left Lindinis we turned north on the Aquae Sulis road. It was now the end of October, the season of Samhain when the spirits of the dead return. A fitting time, I thought, for my own homecoming.
The landscape was growing very familiar now. It was I myself who seemed unreal, as if I had died in truth as well as seeming and was being summoned with the other ghosts who walked at this time of year.
For two days it had been raining, and a silver sheen of water lay over the lowlands, but I insisted that we press onward, for I remembered these marshes as a country with little provision for travellers. We were surprised, however, to find a small inn where the track that led towards Inis Witrin turned off from the Sulis road.
”Oh yes, we have been here for nigh on twenty years,” said the round-faced woman who brought us our food. ”Ever since the good Emperor granted protection to the Christians. My father built this place to serve the travellers who come on pilgrimage to the monks at the Tor.”
I blinked at this, for in my day the monks of Inis Witrin had been a tiny community whose safety depended on being overlooked by the authorities. But the Christianswere the authorities now, and it remained to be seen if they would use the power given them more wisely than those who had held it before.
In the morning we set out once more, bracing ourselves as the carriage lurched across the log causeways. And as the sun sank we saw the pointed cone of the Tor rising against the golden sky, haloed in light.
”Itis real,” breathed Lena.