Chapter 21 River’s Gift

Except for Olyrrwd muttering, “Ossiam’s up to something,” nothing more was said that day of the oracle’s peculiar prophesy, and Herrwn assumed the notion of sending Feywn’s daughter out of Llwddawanden had been safely laid to rest. It was certainly not on his mind when he was waiting to start his recitation of the conclusion of the final saga of The Goddess’s Golden Ring a fortnight later.

Poised and ready to begin his oration, he glanced around the great hall.

The chair to Feywn’s left was vacant, as Rhedwyn had ridden off on a raid that morning, but otherwise all the priests and priestesses were in their places. He looked to the chief priestess in expectation of her usual small nod signaling him to begin. Instead, Feywn rose and held out her hand toward him in a gesture that somehow combined supplication with benediction.

“Tonight, Herrwn, Master of Tales, I wish above all things to hear you tell the story of the River-Goddess and her daughter.”

Having been the consort to—and shared close living quarters with—an exceptionally beautiful woman, Herrwn was more able than most to accept Feywn’s physical appearance as simply a part of who she was. Even he, however, was awed by her voice, a voice which was everything Rhedwyn sang about it—soft yet commanding, and so imbued with sensuality that most men’s knees went weak just hearing her call them by name. The effect on Herrwn that night was all the more compelling as she rarely spoke to him directly and seemed at best only to listen politely when he recited.

Determined not to appear flustered, he took a firm grip on his staff and asked, “From the beginning?”

“From the part about the basket.”

Acceding to Feywn’s unusual request, Herrwn began in the middle of the story after a brief summation of the events that led up to “the part about the basket”—recalling for his listeners how Rhiddengwyn, the River-Goddess, had fallen in love with the mortal hero, Seddwelyn, spurning the advances of the demon Maelgwin, and how Maelgwin had pursued them in a jealous rage, finally slaying Seddwelyn, whose valiant last stand had given Rhiddengwyn the chance to escape with the child of their union, a baby girl named Halfwen, because she was half mortal, and how Rhiddengwyn, clutching Halfwen to her breast, had raced for the river that would have carried them to safety, only to be trapped in a magic net that Maelgwin had set at the river’s edge.

Her strength sapped by the enchanted coils of Maelgwin’s net, Rhiddengwyn managed to reach through the mesh and pluck reeds and lilies that she wove into a basket large enough to hold her newborn infant, then thrust the basket through a gap in the net and into the river just as Maelgwin came out of the trees behind her, armed with her beloved Seddwelyn’s sword and shield.

Protected by Rhiddengwyn’s spells, the basket, with its precious cargo, floated gently down the stream until it came around a bend in the river where a sheepherder, fishing from the shore, cast his line, caught the edge of the basket with his hook, and pulled it up onto the bank.

The sheepherder had six sons but longed for a daughter, so he carried the sleeping infant home to his wife. Delighted with the beauty of the baby girl, they called her “River’s Gift” and agreed to raise her as their own.

One day, the sheepherder’s wife accidentally dropped a spinning spool into the baby’s cradle, and when she leaned over to get it, she was amazed to see that River’s Gift had picked it up in her tiny hands and was spinning a strand of thread that shone like silver. As time passed and River’s Gift grew into a beautiful young girl, the strands of wool she spun transformed into threads that shimmered in all the colors in the rainbow, and she soon began to weave wonderful cloth in patterns that changed with the mood and thoughts of the wearer.

Rhiddengwyn, however, had used the last of her waning powers to save her daughter and was helpless to defend herself from Maelgwin, who took her by force and dragged her off to his mountain kingdom. Kept locked in a windowless tower, she remained a captive there until she convinced Maelgwin that she loved him and enticed him to take off his armor and lay down his weapons. Coaxing him close, whispering seductively in his ear, she caressed his cheek with one hand while with the other she grasped hold of Seddwelyn’s sword and, in a stroke, avenged both her honor and her murdered lover.

Once free, Rhiddengwyn searched in vain for her daughter, calling her name over and over to no avail. Eventually, she despaired of ever seeing her beloved child again and retreated in sorrow to the top of the highest mountain in all the world, where she remained, weeping and sighing, unaware that Halfwen was growing up in a valley far below—believing herself to be the child of the sheepherder and his wife and answering to the name of River’s Gift.

As she ripened into womanhood, River’s Gift became ever more beautiful and the cloth she wove became ever more wondrous. The sheepherder’s wife cut the cloth and made it into garments that were not only lovely to behold but had magical powers that brought good fortune to the wearer. When the sheepherder took the clothes to sell in the market, everyone crowded around him, anxious to buy them and giving him any price he asked.

Over time, River’s Gift’s fame spread throughout the land. She had many suitors, but she refused one after another, saying she would only marry the man who could wear a shirt she had woven and tell her truthfully that he loved her for herself alone—not for the riches that came from her weaving. Many men put on that enchanted shirt and swore their love for her, but no matter how sincere their words seemed, the shirt always gave their inner thoughts away, its luminous colors swirling into pictures of their hands grasping for the gold that her weaving would bring them.

Of all River’s Gift’s many suitors, only the son of the king, who was exceedingly wealthy himself, could say that he loved her without thought of her weaving. He, however, was betrayed by the shirt as well, for it showed that his true longing was for her beauty and not for her wit or her strength of character. Seeing that he was, in his own way, as shallow as her other suitors, River’s Gift sent the king’s son away as she had all those others, except that—moved by his tears and pleading—she let him keep the shirt that she had woven.

Heartbroken, the king’s son went off wearing the shirt which now showed only the picture of River’s Gift’s face, for that was the king’s son’s only thought. Lost in his longing for River’s Gift, he wandered without looking or caring where he was going and surely would have perished from hunger or drowned in the sea or been devoured by wild beasts, except that the shirt had magical powers that made its wearer invincible.

Always full without the need to eat, able to walk on water without sinking, and shielded against all attackers, the king’s son wandered on—down into valleys, across rivers, and up into the mountains—never stopping and never tiring, because the shirt’s magic powers gave him the strength to climb the highest mountain with no more effort than walking along a gentle path through a garden.

It was at the top of the highest mountain that the king’s son met Rhiddengwyn, who had taken on the appearance of a shriveled old woman from her years of lamenting.

All the while that the king’s son had been wandering through the wilderness, he had been thinking himself the saddest of all beings. He’d never imagined that anyone could suffer more than he did until he saw the grief of a mother mourning for her lost child. Then, for the first time, he felt sorry for someone else.

Since he could not marry the beautiful woman he loved, he made up his mind to reject both joy and beauty altogether and marry the weeping crone. That was what he said to Rhiddengwyn—thinking that marrying a king’s son and having all the wealth in the kingdom would at least make the old woman stop crying.

The audacity of a mortal feeling sorry for her did make Rhiddengwyn stop crying and she looked up, outraged and intending to cast a spell to make the king’s son throw himself off the side of the mountain.

But as she was about to begin her incantation, she saw the face on the front of the enchanted shirt and recognized her long-lost daughter. So, instead of commanding the king’s son to jump off the cliff, she greeted him like a son and listened with tears of joy as he told her how he’d come to have the shirt, and together they went to the sheepherder’s cottage and told River’s Gift the truth of who her mother was and why she had such wondrous gifts.

And that was how the River-Goddess’s daughter was reunited with her mother and how the king’s son learned to see beneath surface appearances.

Given the choice of marrying the king’s son, who now loved her for herself, or going to the other world to be with her mother, River’s Gift chose to go with her mother. But before she left, she kissed the king’s son on the lips, and in doing so bestowed upon him the skill of singing songs in a voice of unmatched beauty. And while River’s Gift was never to be seen again by mortals, she proved the meaning of her name, for the tears Rhiddengwyn had shed in the years that she had been mourning for her lost child became the crystal waterfalls that fall down the sides of mountains, the sighs that she had sighed became the gentle breezes that rustle the uppermost leaves in the summer, and eventually, when the king’s son grew old and died, he was reborn as a nightingale and still sings his songs of love for the River-Goddess’s daughter each spring.

Herrwn retired to bed that night feeling pleased with his performance, especially since it had been given without the benefit of advance preparation.

Rising the next day, he noticed that his cousin’s bed was empty but thought nothing of it since, as Olyrrwd always said, patients seemed to go out of their way to get sick just when their physician was trying to get some sleep.

His first inkling that anything was out of order was a vague, indefinable difference in the tone of the singing at the sunrise ritual.

It was a usual sunrise ritual, and the usual priests and priestesses were there. Feywn sang the opening line of the ancient chant. Her voice, always clear, sounded oddly brittle in the still, cold air, and the other priestesses joined in a fraction of a beat out of time. None of the other priests seemed to notice the faint dissonance, however, and so Herrwn told himself that he was being overly sensitive.

When he got back to the classroom, Herrwn saw Olyrrwd talking to Caelym. Knowing his cousin as well as he did, Herrwn saw the tense set to Olyrrwd’s shoulders and realized something was seriously wrong even before he heard Olyrrwd telling Caelym to be patient and that they’d go out to look for a new snake later, “after I have a little talk with Herrwn.”

Thinking that what Olyrrwd had to talk to him about was that the adder he and Caelym had been keeping in their collection of animals had escaped from its vessel, there was more than a little urgency in Herrwn’s first question as they stepped out of the classroom and into the courtyard.

“Have you told the servants?”

“They told me.”

“So they are searching for it, then?”

“Searching for what?”

“The poisonous snake!”

“Oh, him—he’s in his tower, plotting his next move.”

Looking anxiously around for any movement in the grass, it took Herrwn a moment to realize that he had no idea what he and Olyrrwd were talking about.

“I am sorry, but I don’t understand. What did the servants say, exactly?”

    Whether or not what Olyrrwd shared was the servants’ exact words (and Herrwn very much doubted that servants would have used the language Olyrrwd did), what they told him was, in essence, that Feywn had done as Ossiam directed and sent her infant daughter to be fostered in a village outside the valley.

The odd disharmony of the women’s chorus that morning came back to Herrwn’s mind.

“Did Rhonnon agree?”

“Rhonnon knew nothing of it until after it was too late.”

“But why …” Catching himself on the verge of asking a fellow priest to divine what went on in the mind of the priestess who was the embodiment of the Great Mother Goddess, Herrwn stopped, cleared his throat, and reframed his question. “Why do the servants think Feywn would do such a thing?”

“Half of them say that Ossiam lusts after our high priestess and has conjured a spell compelling her to cast away the infant sired by Rhedwyn—and that Rhedwyn himself will be next. The other half say that Feywn is using Ossiam’s vision as an excuse to send the infant off out of jealousy that Rhedwyn dotes on Arianna more than on Herself. Take your pick!”

Neither of these explanations was even remotely acceptable to Herrwn, and he regretted asking. Furthermore, he had no intention of asking which account Olyrrwd favored, knowing full well that Olyrrwd was always ready to believe the worst of Ossiam. Instead, he shook his head and sighed. “I am sure that this must be a misunderstanding.”

Then, partly to change the subject and partly because he thought he saw something slithering under the shrubs at the edge of the courtyard, he asked, “And the snake you were speaking of to Caelym—is it the adder that is missing?”