Child of the Phoenix. Barbara Erskine

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      The moon was rising above the falls, its clear light falling through the spray, down the rock face on to the man and the child. She saw the moonlight touch his fingertips, his hands, his arms where the sleeves of his mantle had fallen back. It stroked silver into his hair and touched his face with cold lights. She felt the silver light touch her own skin and wonderingly she raised her hands to it and felt it warm.

      As if in a dream she found herself wading deeper into the icy water. Her gown had gone. She was naked, but the water was warm. She felt it lap her body like milk. Then she was on the turf bank and amongst the trees, floating, her feet off the ground; flying up the waterfall, spinning like thistledown in the spray before she found herself again amongst the trees, her back against an old oak. She could feel its bark like soft velvet against her skin. She could not move; her limbs would not obey her. The tree was enfolding her, the moonlight in her eyes.

      She saw the man in front of her, naked as she was. He carried water from the falls in a wooden bowl. He raised it to the moon and then dipped his hand in it and traced the secret sign upon her forehead and upon her chest where the small unawakened nipples stirred; then on her stomach and lightly, barely touching her, between her legs.

      Then he was gone and she was alone. She tried to move, but the tree held her; the moonlight filled her eyes and she saw the gods of the forest dancing by the waterfall, their bodies half hidden in the spray.

      VII

      ‘Eleyne, for the love of the Holy Virgin, wake up!’ Luned was shaking her shoulder. ‘Come on, Rhonwen has been calling you for hours!’

      Eleyne opened her eyes. She was in her own bed in the small chamber in the ty hir which she shared with Luned and Rhonwen. Luned was fully dressed and sunshine poured through the window and across the floor.

      ‘Come on!’ Luned pulled the covers from her. ‘Have you forgotten you are going to ride Invictus today?’

      Eleyne climbed slowly to her feet. She was still enfolded in her dream, still bemused by the roar of water and the numbing cold of her limbs.

      There had been faces in her dream: men, women, children, people she had known through aeons of time. There had been love and death and fear and blood. Whirling pictures; laughter and tears; the crash of thunder and splinters of lightning in the black pall which had darkened the sky.

      How had she come home? She remembered nothing of the journey back. She raised her arms above her head and lifted her tangled hair off her neck wearily. Her head ached and she felt far away.

      She was standing naked in front of the window staring out at the hillside of Maes-y-Gaer, where the russet and gold of the bracken caught the morning sun, when Rhonwen appeared, a heap of green fabric over her arm.

      ‘Eleyne, what are you doing? You’ll catch your death!’ she exclaimed, shocked at the blatant nakedness. ‘Here. The sempstresses sat up all night to make you a new gown.’ It had helped to pass the time while Eleyne was away; helped to quiet her conscience; and she too had noticed the previous day Eleyne’s shabbiness as the child stood next to her mother.

      Chivvying her impatiently, she dressed her charge in a new shift and slipped the gown over the girl’s head.

      ‘Say nothing to her,’ Einion had said, the unconscious girl still in his arms. ‘She will think it all a dream. The gods have marked her. She’s theirs. In due time they will claim her for their own.’

      ‘And you will make her father annul the marriage?’

      Einion had nodded and smiled. ‘Have no fear. I shall speak to him when she is of an age to choose a man. Then she will take whoever she wishes amongst the Druids. She will belong to no man and to any man as the goddess directs.’

      ‘No!’ Rhonwen pleaded. ‘She must remain a virgin – ’

      ‘Virginity is for the daughters of Christ, Lady Rhonwen, for the nuns. The followers of the old gods worship as they have always worshipped, with their bodies.’ He looked at her with piercing eyes and for a moment his gaze softened. ‘If you have kept yourself a virgin, Lady Rhonwen, it was to assuage your own fears, not to please the Lady you serve. Do not wish the same fate on this child.’

      Less than an hour of the night remained when Rhonwen tucked Eleyne, still deeply drugged, into her bed, her ice-cold body rigid next to Luned’s warm relaxed form. Looking down at the two girls as Luned turned and put her arm over her friend, Rhonwen felt her tears begin to fall.

      It was as Rhonwen was brushing her hair that Eleyne remembered. ‘You knew he would be there, didn’t you!’ She jerked her head away from Rhonwen’s hands and stood up. ‘You knew, and you took me to him!’ Behind her Luned, who had been sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on her stockings, looked astonished at the sudden vehemence. ‘How could you! I thought you loved me, I thought you cared. You betrayed me!’

      Eleyne had thought she was safe at Aber. She had thought he would not dare to follow her. She stood up, pushing Rhonwen aside: ‘What did he do to me?’

      ‘He gave you to the goddess.’

      ‘Father Peter and the bishop would not like that.’ Father Peter was one of the chaplains at Aber.

      ‘You mustn’t tell them. You mustn’t tell anyone, ever.’

      Rhonwen had realised that Luned was all ears. She turned towards her. ‘Nor you, Luned. No one must ever know, no one.’

      ‘What will happen to me now?’ Eleyne still had her back to them. Her hands were gripping the stone sill of the window as she tried to clamp down on the horror and fear which had broken through the barriers and flooded through her. She was shaking.

      ‘It means you can stay here in Gwynedd. When you are old enough Einion will tell your father what has happened.’ Rhonwen’s voice was calm and soothing.

      ‘I won’t have to go and live with Lord Huntingdon?’

      ‘No.’

      No, you will be given to the Druids; who will use your body for worship; for a temple; or for their plaything. Oh, great goddess, have I done right? Would she have been happier married to Huntingdon, living far away …?

      ‘I don’t want to see the future, Rhonwen.’ Eleyne was looking out at the russet hillside. There the old gods lived; the stones of their temple lay there still, tumbled on the hillside.

      ‘You have no choice, child. You have the gift.’

      ‘Einion would never have known if you hadn’t told him.’

      ‘I had to, Eleyne,’ Rhonwen said guiltily. ‘It would have destroyed you. Don’t you see? He will tell you how to use your powers for good. To help your father, to help Gruffydd and perhaps Owain and little Llywelyn after him. For Wales. Besides, don’t you see? I have saved you from marriage. I have saved you from going to a stranger like your sisters.’

      There was a long silence. Then Eleyne turned back to her. ‘I am not going to stay here. I never want to see him again.’

      ‘Eleyne! You have no choice, cariad. You belong to him now.’

      ‘No!’

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