It was another test, of course. It was Saraid, who sleeps with her two young children in the bed next to mine, who told me. I had wakened her with my dreaming, yelling apparently that there was no corner of space left in my head and they must leave off lest it burst open. “It will get better,” she whispered to me in the dark. “They weed out the weak plants as early as possible. If you endure through the first year, then they know you have the strength to continue.”
“Next year will be easier, then?” I asked.
“I did not say easier.”
I have not mentioned our teachers. Besides Tlachta, there is one other druid master on the isle. Her name is Macha. She is old and very fat, with a wheezy chest and thin white hair that sprouts unevenly from the line of her tonsure. Macha teaches us everything to do with the history of Ireland—its origins and invasions and battles and people—and while her frail voice sometimes gives out, her mind never does, but is as precise and nimble as a cat. Her knowledge of astronomy is also great—but she leaves that to others now, for the night air is cruel to her old bones.
Of the others, my favorite teacher is Rathnait. Her passion is the earth and its vast lore, and she says its lessons must be read with the body as well as the mind. So even in our first year, she would sometimes relieve us of the endless memory work and lead us out
to forage for herbs or read weather in the clouds. It was like a release from captivity, these little excursions, and I returned with a new sense of space in my overcrowded head.
Tlachta herself we see little of, for she works mainly with the more advanced apprentices. She is wise not only in law, but in ceremonial magic, ritual, divination and sacrifice. It is for this knowledge that she leads the Samhain ceremony for the high king himself.
I had not been long at my studies when the autumn wind grew cold teeth and the wheel of the sun left the sky earlier each day. I had no doubt that Samhain on the island would be unlike any I had known.
Tlachta would not be there. The daughter of Mug Ruith makes the long journey each year to preside over Tara’s Samhain ceremonies, and the hill where the great fire is lit is now called the Hill of Tlachta. There are hills closer to Tara that might be more convenient for the high king, but there is none in all Ireland so close to the Otherworld. My mistress and her helpers spend more than a week there every year, seeing to the preparations and presiding over the judgments afterward.
Those of us who remained on the Isle of Women had no hill, but then we did not need our fire to be seen far and wide, but only by our own little community. I knew where our Samhain bonfire would be—by the yew tree, at the heart of the island’s power.
Tlachta made it clear before she left that the first-year students were not to invite visions or have any contact with the Sidhe. “Some of the senior apprentices will be seeking dreams of
power,” she said. “You are not to join in their rituals or drink the dream draught. If you see people of the Sidhe or spirits of the dead, do not speak to them. Simply look away, and let them pass by. If you are frightened in any way, seek out Macha. She can protect you.”
And so we were put to work as Samhain laborers. As a child, I had always marveled at how the Samhain fire lit without fail, even in the foulest weather. It is not, I hope, giving away too much of the druid’s craft if I reveal that this has less to do with magic than with painstaking preparation. Every single log that goes into the Samhain fire has been soaked in oil or rolled in fat ahead of time. It is backbreaking work that leaves a person greasy and rank as a rendering floor.
But we were bathed and clean as evening fell and we paddled our way back by threes and fours in our little coracles to the dark shores of the island. And in the black of night before the fire was lit, as the songs and chants were offered, I felt them before I saw them—the Other ones, exhaled on the island’s misty breath, drifting across its waters. The veil that held them back was thin here at any time; on Samhain it simply wafted away like smoke and our worlds mingled. I watched in wonder as the fire leapt up, revealing tall men and women with silver hair and jeweled gowns holding their hands out to its warmth. As the night wore on I saw many of them stop to converse with one or other of our women, sometimes at length and earnestly. Indeed I am sure I saw Treasa, who will win her feathered cloak next season, entwined in a shining figure’s arms, her face lifted up to his kiss, as they vanished together into the darkness. Others of our women lay in a dream trance, their
eyes faraway, mouths moving without sound. I remembered my instructions, though, and if the eyes of one of our visitors fell upon me, I would nod respectfully and look away, and they would drift by without stopping.
And so the night passed until nearly dawn. I was tired by then, my shoulders achy from hauling wood and my eyes worn out, it seemed, from the wonders parading before them. I hunkered into my cloak, dropped my head onto my knees and let my eyelids close.
I felt her presence, as surely as I had in the Speckled House so long ago. She hovered before me, not passing by as the others had, and finally I raised my head, thinking perhaps she waited for the polite acknowledgment I had given the others.
It was Liban. I knew her, and she knew me also and had waited to speak with me. Knowing this—that she remembered the young girl who had been a mere bystander to the drama that played out the night she came to my father’s sickbed—I could not look away. I rose to my feet and bowed my head to her, and when she smiled I remembered the first smile she had given me, and I but a child of eight summers.
“I have come this night to speak with you,” she said, “and though I have seen you avoid others of my kind, it is my hope you will remember me and know I bring no harm.”
“I remember you, lady,” I said. “It is honored I am by your presence.”
She grew serious then. “I have come to tell you I am sorry for the death of Cuchulainn, a hero well-deserving of my sister’s love, and of Emer too, who was a woman of great heart. For when news came to us of this grievous loss, my sister Fand sent up a
lament for her lover of old. But I thought of you, Luaine, left on this earth alone, and I remembered how your eyes knew me even as a child. So it is glad, but not surprised, I am to find you here, though,”—and here her silvery outline leaned in toward me as she looked more closely—”I see there has been harm done along the way, after all.”
There was anger in her voice then, and I was so moved by her concern that for a moment my throat threatened to close off my words. But I found them again. When there is need, the words come.
“There was harm done,” I agreed, “but it has been healed, and I am well.”
Long fingers reached toward me, and I was startled to feel them warm and solid against my cheek. I suppose I expected her to dissolve against me like a misty illusion. In fact the warmth became a heat, radiating into my scar, and my eyes widened at the sensation.
Finally she drew back her hand. “There is a little more healing for you, such as I can offer,” she said. “But why I have come is to give you this.” She placed in my hand a crystal teardrop. I could feel its many facets against my palm. “If there is ever a time you have need of me, hold this in the sun’s rays, or even against the fire or lamp’s flame, until it breaks the light into a fan of colors. Call my name, and I will come through the rainbow light. For your father served us well against our enemies when he came to the Happy Plain, and his memory is honored among us.”
I gazed at her in astonishment and stammered out my thanks. Before my eyes she began to drift back and grow dim, until finally she was truly no more than the mist I had imagined.
The next morning I looked in a mirror, hoping that Liban had somehow erased the mark of my wound. She had not, but her touch was healing nonetheless, for the scar has never again kept me awake with its aching. When the weather makes it grumble, it is not long before a steady soothing heat grows within it, and the pain quiets.
I had but one visit from Geanann that first year, for he would be eligible for the feathered robe in just over a year’s time, and his two masters were pushing him hard.
“Fingin is determined I shall have the skill of the god of healing himself before he is done with me, while my father will allow no scrap of knowledge from the other branches of learning to be overlooked,” he told me ruefully. “It is all I can do to survive their zeal.”
“You are at Emain, then,” I said, my voice flat. Fingin was Conchobor’s personal healer. It sickened me to think of Geanann there, right under the king’s nose. Foolish, I know. There was no healer more renowned than Fingin. Who else would Geanann study under?
But I was surprised to see him shaking his head. “I will not stay there,” he said, his eyes dark and hard. “I am with my mother’s people, not far west of Emain. There is travel back and forth, of course, but I prefer that. My father knows the reason. Fingin does not, but he accepts it.” Then he flashed me a quick smile. “Actually, Fingin probably does know something of the reason. There is little that escapes him. But he has a physician’s discretion.”
We talked of lighter things, then, and the hours flew by until the time came for his leaving. And then he laid his hand on my shoulder and returned to the subject of the king.
“I began my apprenticeship when I was only twelve years old,” he said to me. I did the figuring in my head—he was twenty-five, then. Ten years older than me. “It is half my life I have been on this path, and now my goal is within my sight. I cannot change masters now, not so close to my testing.”
I would not ask or expect it, I began to say, but I remembered how my heart had gone cold at the thought of him there, and realized I had indeed, in some secret place, hoped for it. So I did not say a half-truth, but only nodded my understanding.
“But it is this I wish for you to know, Luaine. I am not bound to Conchobor, nor will I be. When I win my robe, I will be gone from that place, and Conchobor no more aware of my absence than he is of my presence now. To him, I am just one of Cathbad’s many apprentices.”
I was not sure he was right about that. Conchobor did not get where he was by being oblivious to his surroundings, and I didn’t imagine the identity of Cathbad’s son escaped him. But I was glad Geanann would not stay with Conchobor. It was selfish of me, perhaps, to put my own grudge before Geanann’s prospects, for there is no doubt he could become the king’s physician after Fingin. But I was glad all the same.
I had messages from Roisin that year too, so I knew that King Lugaid had indeed remembered Berach and welcomed him into his service. But it was not until the following Samhain that I was able to see her.
Late in the summer, Tlachta called me to the small cluttered room where she had first interviewed me and made her proposal.
“I do not usually invite the less experienced apprentices to assist me at Samhain,” she said. I had taken my vows the week before and was now a “true” apprentice. “However, you have proved to me the seriousness of your calling, and I believe you may take a special interest in observing the judgments in the days that follow. Also,”—and here her lips twitched into a rare smile—”I am aware that you have dear friends in the area. I’m sure we could manage to free you for a visit.”
I needed no persuading. But Tlachta had not finished with me. This journey, she explained, brought to urgency a problem she had been mulling over for some time.
“You do not strike me as a person who will wish to spend her life hidden away on the Isle of Women,” she said to me. “Yet if you leave these shores, how long will it be until word reaches Conchobor of a young woman of the same name and age as his wife, her face blemished as though by a poet’s curse? And given such news, how long will he believe in your death, which was never proved?”
“I have worried about this also,” I confessed. “I suppose I thought that I would be here for some years, and that...well, that the king was not likely to live a great deal longer.”
Tlachta had none of my squeamishness in anticipating another’s death.
“You could wait for him to die,” she agreed frankly. “But Conchobor has been a strong man all his life. Despite his age, he may have a good many years left to him.”
I was trapped, then. Except...I glanced up quickly. Tlachta’s hazel eyes, tinged gold in their intensity, were trained on me like a hawk’s.
“You have a plan,” I said. “You would not have invited me to the Hill of Tlachta if you did not. What am I to do?”
She leaned forward, her eyes never leaving my own.
“You must leave Luaine behind and become another,” she said. “You must dream for a name.”
I had wondered how I would ever manage to sleep. To seek a true dream, I was to sleep on the wattles of knowledge. And while the very name filled me with awe, the reality—a lumpy rack of woven rowan whips erected under the great yew tree—looked very uncomfortable indeed.
But the dream draught is powerful, and so is the body’s demand for rest after the long vigil that precedes a dreaming. Indeed, as I lowered myself gingerly onto the wattle bed, I realized it did not matter if I even closed my eyes. I had been two nights without sleep, and fatigue had made my waking into a series of fragmented, brightly colored episodes as strange as dreaming. If there was a vision meant for me, it would find me.
The stars wheeled overhead like an endless tapestry recounting the deeds of a strange world, framed at one corner of my vision by a black fringe of yew branches. The bright patterns coalesced and scattered before me, so that at one moment my eyes beheld a familiar constellation, or a fanciful picture of my own invention—a warrior’s steed, a handled mirror—and the next nothing but a random infinity of light. And then it was as if a heavy black cloak was drawn over the sky, and the stars became darkness, and I slept.
The lawn is studded with stars. No...I see now, not stars at all, but the tiny white flowers that used to nestle in the grass around our house
in the spring. There is no sign of a house, though, nor any familiar landmark to say where I might be.