sandals, the pitcher she had carried, the words she spoke – came out of another age, yet she herself seemed so familiar, like someone I knew well but could not for the moment place.
I wiped my eyes and told her who I was. I could see she didn’t understand me any more than I understood her, but as I watched, I saw her make up her mind about something and step towards me. To my astonishment, she put her hand on my forehead. It was so cool and comforting. Holding one hand steady on my forehead, she began to move the other gently across my neck and shoulders. She pressed lightly on the rigid muscles and worked her way down my spine to my waist.
The coolness of her hand eased the throbbing in my head so quickly I could scarcely believe it. Wherever she touched me there was a warm, tingling feeling which spread out as she went on talking to me. Although I still couldn’t understand her actual words, it was obvious she was telling me who she was and how she came to be here, today, when I had such need of her.
Sitting there, her hands on my head and back, I realised I felt perfectly calm and at ease while the pain in my head had simply melted away. I closed my eyes. Instantly, as if I were viewing a film, I began to see the girl whose hands rested upon me moving through scene after scene of her own life. As I followed the images, I grasped what she’d been trying to tell me. Not the details, of course, but enough. I looked up at her and smiled. Her life had been no easier than mine.
When she smiled back at me, it was such a gentle, warm smile, the smile of someone I felt I had always known. Looking up at her, it was just like meeting someone you know so well in a context where you don’t expect them. Once, in the Ladies at Euston Station I came face to face with a girl I’d been at school with. Instant recognition, but total puzzlement as to how and where we’d known each other.
Here and now, I just couldn’t place this girl. I could give her no name. At the same time, I was absolutely sure her presence was bringing back to me some shared experience I had somehow managed to forget.
She folded her hands together, laid her head against them and closed her eyes. When she opened them again and nodded to me, her meaning was quite clear. I ought to go and sleep. She was quite right. I was absolutely exhausted. But I couldn’t just get up and walk away when she had been so kind to me.
I stretched out my hand to touch her. To my surprise she drew back, a look of concern on her face. After a moment, she bent down, chose a bloom from the bunch of kingcups she had laid so carefully on the ground, and handed the flowering stem to me. Our fingers brushed and she was gone.
I sat quite still, alone in the quiet of the afternoon, the whizz of cars a distant mutter beyond the density of the shrubbery. I stared at the bright golden eye of the kingcup with the single unfolding bud at its side. I gazed around hopefully as if perhaps she might have moved into the shrubbery, though I knew perfectly well she had gone.
I made an enormous effort, got up and walked unsteadily back to the house, clutched the banisters as I climbed the stairs and went into my room. I must have fallen asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.
The heat of noonday burned in a cloudless sky. On the great mound nothing moved but the shimmer of haze above the baked earth which had been worn bare in the preceding weeks by the movements of men and horses. Since the Festival of Beltane it had been fine. Day followed day of warmth and sunshine with only the slightest of showers in the night to settle the dust and bring freshness to the early dawn.
Deara had loved every moment of the unexpected fine spell. After the raw chill of the previous months, the confinement to hut and storeroom, the smoke of fires, the scratch of her heavy wool cloak and the lingering odours of horses and penned cattle, she revelled in the sudden freedom like the wild creatures themselves.
In the first weeks she covered miles everyday, doing the old woman’s bidding with pleasure. Coming back each evening footsore and wolf-hungry for the evening stew, her arms and satchel full of bark and flowers and leaves, she had trudged up the dusty path to the main gate and known herself happy. It was the first time such happiness had come to her. And it frightened her. Surely such joy was not given to mortal kind. Perhaps it was some jest of the gods to make her thus so happy that they might cast her down and humble her.
Now, as she reached the edge of the wood and began the short, steep climb again, she knew joy had gone. Today, the sun was no longer her friend. He, who had warmed her and brought flowers blossoming from the damp earth, was now an enemy, a cruel white eye, who mocked her sadness, who rejoiced at the end to her freedom, who would shine on through the months of her sixteenth summer, whether she were to survive the coming time or not.
She tossed back her long dark hair impatiently and ran a brown arm across her brow where beads of perspiration gleamed on her high, pale forehead. The flowers were wilting already though she had picked them only in the water-meadows beyond the wood. She cradled them in her right arm, pulled her tunic higher within her woven belt and stepped out of the cool shade of the wood.
Perhaps it was too late already, though she had been as quick as she could. Conor had said Merdaine would not see another sunset, and indeed, in the night, when she sat by the bedplace with her, she thought the old woman would not greet another dawn. But she had.
In the first dim light she had stirred and spoken to her, but Deara had not understood. The old woman seemed to be speaking another language, one she had never heard before. The words were perfectly clear, she was not wandering in her mind, like other old people she had seen die, nor was it like the wound fever of warriors when they called to comrades or lovers in their pain. No, Merdaine’s words had meaning and they were meant for her, she felt sure, but she could make nothing of them.
And neither could Conor. She could tell that from his face. Not that Conor would ever admit to such a thing. How could he, a Druid, a King’s Druid at that, skilled in all the knowledges of this world, the other world and the world beyond? How could he possibly admit that he did not understand?
Conor had simply pretended not to hear. He had busied himself with trimming the candles before the God, moving them so that the deep-set stone features took on their most benign aspect. Conor was a great believer in getting the patterns right. Merdaine was not and their wills had often clashed. ‘No,’ Merdaine would say, ‘that is not the way, not for this man, in this place, in this time.’ Yes, one must acknowledge the God and make due sacrifice, she would agree, but not all power lay in the hands of the God, even the mighty Nodons, the deity served by all who sought to heal men by words or deeds.
Deara toiled up the steep slope with all the speed she could manage. The guards on the gate were half asleep, but it was no matter. The air was so still and heavy you could feel the movement of a rider as far away as the river. Beyond the gate she threaded her way between crowded huts and empty cattle pens. Dogs stirred and went back to sleep again as she passed, her leather sandals making almost no noise in the deep dust. She looked neither to right nor left, her eyes firmly fixed on the low doorway of a larger wooden hut beyond and behind the King’s Hall. With a sigh of relief she saw that the door-hanging was still in place. It had not been tied back to let the spirit go. Merdaine yet lived.
Without a sound, Deara entered the hut and knelt by the low couch now pulled out into the centre of the dim room. The candles had burned low, but Conor was asleep, his head hung down on his chest. He snuffled rather than snored, like a sleeping dog hunting rabbits in a dream.
Deara took the old woman’s hand and laid the flowers below it. They were kingcups, broad and gold, the flowers she had asked for when she roused at mid-morning. They gleamed even in the dim light.
Merdaine stirred, her eyes flickered open.
‘Child, you are early back today, you cannot have finished your tasks, why is that?’
