Chapter 2: The Passage

Ossiam and Olyrrwd were Herrwn’s cousins, sons of the two uncles who’d returned with his father following their last attempt to reconcile with the branch of their family that had left the shrine and converted to Christianity. Herrwn was the firstborn son of the shrine’s chief priest and master bard. Ossiam, the son of their oracle, was born six months after Herrwn and six months before Olyrrwd, the son of their physician, and the three had spent their formative years studying, eating, and sleeping together in the quarters that included the classroom for priests-in-training and its adjacent dormitory.

A stranger looking at Herrwn and Ossiam would have taken them for brothers. Both were tall and slender with sharply defined features. Both had fine, straight hair that darkened from blond to brown as they got older and lightened to silver in their middle years. Both had gray eyes (although Ossiam’s exact shade changed with the color of his robes and the light around him, while Herrwn’s did not). Both of them had been handsome as young men and both remained imposing into old age, so it puzzled Herrwn that none of the shrine’s priestesses had ever chosen Ossiam to be her consort.

Where Herrwn and Ossiam were tall and thin, Olyrrwd was short and stout. He had pale, protruding eyes, bristling, rust-colored hair, and a nose that was too small for the rest of his face. He looked, as Ossiam had sometimes remarked with an undertone that hovered on the edge of spite, “Like a changeling left in place of his mother’s real child.” Ossiam didn’t actually say, “by trolls,” but the implication was there.

It seemed to Herrwn that Ossiam and Olyrrwd had begun to quarrel as soon as they could talk. From as far back into their childhood as he could recall, the two were arguing about something—who could run faster, who could throw stones farther, who could recite the most words in a single breath. In contests where being bigger mattered, Ossiam had always won; in those that required aim and dexterity, Olyrrwd had—so the overall balance of victories and defeats stayed close. Now and again, however, one of them (usually Olyrrwd) would score a resounding triumph—like the time they’d been taking turns reciting sections of a particularly demanding epic that required the orator to switch back and forth in rapid succession between the voices of the Sea-Goddess, the mortal hero, and an entire family of ogres.

As Olyrrwd, whose voice had already completed its maturation into an unequivocal bass, was struggling with the lines of the goddess, Ossiam sneered, “You sound like a toad croaking in a bog.”

At the time, Olyrrwd had just grinned and gone on, but he spent the following week training his cat to start wailing when he snapped his fingers. The week after that he hid the cat in a basket in the classroom’s cupboard and snapped his fingers just as Ossiam opened his mouth to sing. The effect was an all-too-close approximation of Ossiam’s erratic and unpredictable fluctuations between a boy’s soprano and the high tenor where it would eventually settle. Instead of laughing, however, Olyrrwd had exclaimed, “Why, Ossie, that’s the best you’ve ever done it!” in a tone of complete sincerity.

In spite of Ossiam and Olyrrwd’s youthful disputes, the three cousins remained inseparable throughout their early years of study, sharing a chamber reserved for the most gifted and promising of the Druids-in-training even after they’d completed the second level of their instruction and been chosen as their fathers’ disciples. At the time, in fact, Ossiam and Olyrrwd’s squabbles provided a release from the strenuous demands of their studies.

“Strenuous” was hardly sufficient to describe the studies required to become a priest in the shrine of the Great Mother Goddess, an indoctrination that began at the age of six and continued well into adulthood.

Starting with simple recitations, songs, and dances, the daily lessons quickly advanced to include oratory and the basics of ritual invocations. By the time boys destined for entry into the highest orders completed their second level of instruction, they were expected to answer any question put to them about any of the scores of interconnected sagas that comprised the nine major epics that lay at the heart of their cult’s belief system and to have completely mastered the rites and rituals which, taken together, constituted the symbolic reenactment of the creation of the mortal world as well as providing an explanation for the seasons.

At some point between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, the best of the youthful initiates would be chosen for one of the three great fields of study and move on to the final stage of the indoctrination needed to become a bard, a healer, or an oracle.

For Herrwn, who earned his place as his father’s understudy, this had meant not only learning to recite both the Eastern and Western versions of those epics from memory but also to draw on relevant tales in order to explain and defend their order’s core convictions—that the Great Mother Goddess was the first and foremost of the world’s vast array of gods and goddesses, that it was from Her that all life sprang, that they themselves were the descendants of the firstborn of Her mortal children, and that it was because of this—and because of their continued precision in conducting her rites and rituals—that She chose to remain among them, embodied within their highest priestess.

The belief that a supreme supernatural being of infinite power and importance would take the time and trouble to look after the welfare of a single cult, leaving the larger world to fend for itself, might seem foolish to outsiders, but Herrwn believed it. He had seen it happen.

It was in early fall of the year that he was twelve. His father (whose name was also Herrwn, so that Herrwn was called Little Herrwn long after he achieved his adult height) had hinted that if he memorized the complete saga of the courtship of the Earth-Goddess by the Sun-God, he might be allowed to take part in “some very important rite.”

The weather that day was sunny and clear, but there was a crispness in the air so that even with his eyes closed, concentrating on his delivery of the speech of the Earth-Goddess decrying her favorite consort’s infidelity, Herrwn could tell that summer was ending and fall was setting in. Opening his eyes after what he was confident was a good, if not perfect, rendition, he had expected his father to say that he had done well and, at most, make a few corrections.

His father, however, remained silent, gazing out of the window with a preoccupied look on his face.

Herrwn was about to ask if he had made some grave error (he had just started using the word “grave,” liking the profound and important way it sounded, and he also felt “error” was a more elevated word than “mistake”), but just as he was opening his mouth, a woman servant burst into the room.

That any woman should burst into the priest’s classroom was startling. That it should be a servant was shocking. And then she spoke without waiting to be given permission!

“The Priestess … You must come now!”

While the title “priestess” could mean Herrwn’s mother as well as his aunts and all of his grown-up female cousins, “The Priestess” was a term reserved for Eldrenedd, who had been chief priestess and the Goddess incarnate for all of Herrwn’s life (and for twenty-eight years before he was born).

Instead of giving the servant a stern look or otherwise correcting her presumptuous behavior, Herrwn’s father told her to take Herrwn, Ossiam, and Olyrrwd to the nursery and hurried out of the classroom.

There’d been nothing to do but follow the servant through the winding hallways that led out of the priests’ quarters, circled around the central courtyard, and passed through the archway into the women’s side of the shrine to the nursery, where Herrwn’s little brother and the rest of the shrine’s children were having breakfast.

Ignoring the three boys’ questions, the chief nursery servant made them sit down at the table and set little cups of warm milk and little bowls of sweetened porridge in front of them.

“That’s baby food!” Ossiam protested indignantly, at which Olyrrwd gleefully picked up his bowl and plopped the contents into Ossiam’s, saying, “You’ll need more because you’re a big baby.”

There was a moment of startled silence. Then the little boy sitting next to Ossiam picked up his bowl and dumped it into the bowl of the little girl sitting on the other side of him, saying, “Here, you’re a baby!” starting a chain reaction of children turning their bowls upside down and shrieking, “You’re a baby!” at each other.

Servants rushed around the tables, putting the bowls right side up and scraping up the splattered cereal, while the chief nurse scolded Ossiam and Olyrrwd, warning them to behave or she would go and tell their parents.

After a brief show of contrition, Olyrrwd and Ossiam left the table and began to fight over a toy that one or the other of them had left behind six years earlier until the nurse threw up her hands, left the room, and returned with Herrwn’s father.

Although he hadn’t been an active participant in his cousins’ misconduct, Herrwn was hoping that once his father had given his usual calm admonishment to “take this chance to learn how to resolve your disputes with reason and compromise,” he would explain what was going on. Instead, the elder Herrwn took Ossiam and Olyrrwd by the backs of their robes and handed them over to a man-servant with the stinging rebuke “If you are going to bicker like servants’ children, then you may go and stay with servants until you are ready to act like Druids” and left.

Shaken by his father’s uncharacteristic harshness, Herrwn spent the rest of the day doing whatever the chief nurse told him. He played games with his brother and the other children, and then, pretending to be a bard, he told them stories from his own lessons until the end of the afternoon when his father came back—dressed in his finest silk ceremonial robe and carrying a matching robe for Herrwn.

By then, Herrwn had guessed that the mysterious rite his father had been hinting at was about to happen, so he was on his very best behavior as the two of them went together to the shrine’s main meeting hall, where all the shrine’s priests were forming a line behind the chief oracle.

“Where are the priestesses?” What Herrwn really meant was Where is my mother? but he didn’t want his father to know how nervous he felt.

“They’re waiting for us.”

Herrwn could see from his father’s set expression that this was no time for questions. Pressing his lips together and bowing his head, he reminded himself that he was a pupil of the shrine’s chief priest on the verge of taking part in his first great rite, and it was incumbent (“incumbent” being another word he’d taken to using recently) upon him to act accordingly.

Following close behind his father, he joined the line of priests. As they passed in single file out of the hall, their chief oracle handed each of them a lighted candle without speaking—something that was quite out of the ordinary for Ossiam’s father, who always had something portentous to say on every occasion.

The rays of the late-afternoon sun filtered through the branches overhead, making a lacework of shadows on the ground as the procession wound its way deep into the forest. Leaving the paths that Herrwn was familiar with, they climbed upwards until they came to a massive granite outcrop that was split down the middle, as if it had been hewn open by a giant’s axe. The priests, who had been murmuring a soft chant praising the Goddess and all of Her works, fell silent—except for the oracle who raised his voice in a long (and, to Herrwn, incomprehensible) incantation before he led the way into the dark crevice.

Herrwn edged along after his father, sliding one hand along the side of the rock wall and holding his candle out to see where he was putting his feet. The air in the narrow passageway was oddly warm and had a faint odor that reminded him of one of their physician’s pungent healing potions.

The smell grew stronger as he stepped out of the rift to find himself in a small valley, a place the likes of which he had never seen or imagined.