Chapter 72: Elegy for Olyrrwd

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Ealendwr’s funeral was the first to be held that year. The second was for Ollowen, an elderly priestess mainly known for having been Caelendra’s paternal aunt. Olyrrwd’s was the third.

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While Olyrrwd had attended the rites held for Ollowen at the altar in the shrine’s main grove, he hadn’t gone on the steep climb to their sacred burial chambers. “I can’t make it on foot anymore,” he’d muttered as he hobbled away from the gathering line of mourners, “and I’m not ready to be carried up there just yet.”

After the interment, Herrwn went to look for Olyrrwd. He checked in the healing chamber and in the priests’ quarters before taking the lakeshore path to the secluded spot where they often went to talk or think. That was where he found him, sitting on a low bench the village woodworker had made for him out of gratitude for some past healing—leaning back with his legs stretched out and his hands clasped behind his head.

After sitting down next to his cousin and drawing his own knees up, Herrwn looked out across the shimmering waters now and then ruffled by a stray breeze. It was just about here that Olyrrwd had once picked up a stone, sent it skimming across the surface of the lake, and counted the remaining years of his life on the number of times it bounced.

“Skipping stones is not augury!” Herrwn had said it then, and he said it again now.

Olyrrwd’s answer was a grunt that could have been either accord or disagreement.

Not about to let the matter rest, Herrwn persisted, “There are other things to be considered, equally or more significant.”

“Such as?” From the sideways look Olyrrwd gave Herrwn—his head cocked slightly, one eyebrow raised higher than the other—and the skeptical tone of his voice, he might have been addressing a beginning apprentice with the temerity to question his master’s assessment of a patient’s ailment.

Herrwn, however, was not some novice in the healing chamber, and he had given this particular question a great deal of thought, especially as the end of the twelve years Olyrrwd predicted for himself drew closer.

“Such as the fact that we—Ossiam, you, and me—were born in the same year, myself first, Ossiam second, and you last, and each transition of our lives—entering training, moving up to discipleship, becoming chief priests—has occurred in that order, so it is only reasonable to assume that we shall continue in that pattern, myself crossing through the curtain into the next world first, then Ossiam, then you. So,” he summed up what he felt to be a persuasive, even compelling, argument, “your dying young is simply out of the question.”

“You can hardly say I’m dying young,” Olyrrwd countered. “Fifty-six is older than most, what with …”

He went on to list the myriad and sundry causes of death of those who survived past childhood, beginning with bloody flux, proceeding through the seven deadly fevers and three ways wounds went putrid, then pausing to cough and spit before finishing, “and foul, festering lung rot.”

There was an answer to that and Herrwn gave it.

“Most ordinary people, perhaps—but we are not ordinary.” He augmented his argument by naming a dozen elder priests who’d earned the title by living to ninety or more.

“Although, as you may recall, our own fathers barely made it into their seventies.”

“But that was the plague and even then they died together, or at least within a few days of each other, and in the order of their birth!” This was, Herrwn felt, an excellent and all but irrefutable point, and he allowed it a moment to sink in before answering Olyrrwd’s litany of mortal afflictions with an equally long list of patients—priests and priestesses, servants and villagers—whose health the physician had restored with his extensive curative skills and medicinal knowledge of remedies. Carried on by the force of his argument, he asked, almost demanded, “So why can you not apply those remedies to yourself?”

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” Olyrrwd snapped. “Regrettably,” he continued in a tone softened to a grumble, “all of that excellent skill and knowledge is contained within a body that has always had quite annoying limitations and now is practically useless.” Before Herrwn could protest, he went on, “Like it or not—and I, for one, do not like it—I am going to die.”

There was something very final in the way Olyrrwd said this, so final that Herrwn didn’t attempt to put forward any further rebuttal. He did manage, however, by strength of will, to ask, “When?” in a fairly steady voice.

“If I am right in my estimate—which I have no doubt that I am—I shall be joining our venerated ancestors in the sacred catacombs on or about the next autumn equinox.” Olyrrwd coughed, spat, and sighed. “I will do my best to depart on the day before and save everyone the bother of making an extra trip up there.”

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Although increasingly weak and seeming to cough more than he breathed, Olyrrwd drove himself relentlessly for the rest of the summer and into the fall, stocking the healing chamber’s shelves, sharpening and shining his collection of surgical knives and saws, and making sure that Caelym could recite from memory every treatment for every ailment he would be likely to encounter, along with the responses to all of the excuses he was going to hear from his patients for why they did not do as they were told.

Then, on the morning of the day before the autumn equinox, Olyrrwd didn’t get out of bed.

Kneeling down next to him, Caelym asked, “Shall I have a stretcher brought to carry you to the healing chamber?”

“No, the healing chamber is too crowded. I’ll just stay here and have one day in peace.”

Since there were no patients in the healing chamber just then, Herrwn assumed that Olyrrwd meant it was too crowded with ghosts. That seemed to be what Caelym thought as well, since he nodded in agreement, pulled a chair over for Herrwn, and went to get another for himself.

Herrwn spent the day holding Olyrrwd’s hand and listening to him discuss the ebbing of his life with Caelym as though it were just one more classroom lesson. Vaguely aware of Benyon stoking the fire in the hearth or Moelwyn refilling the pitcher of poppy juice, he had no sense of time moving forward until Olyrrwd reached over to pull his stained and battered healer’s bag off of the bedside table, handed it to Caelym, and wheezed, “It’s yours now.”

Turning to Herrwn, Olyrrwd gasped, something that sounded like “Ossie” and then, “I’ve taken care … of everything … except Ossie … I meant to … I should have … but …” His eyelids fell closed, then opened again. “But I just … just couldn’t … I’m sorry … now it’s up to you … to watch out … to watch …” Looking Herrwn directly in the face, he repeated, “watch,” one more time, dropped back on his pillow, closed his eyes, and gave one last, long, sighing breath.

Herrwn was not sure at first what Olyrrwd’s last words meant, but as he thought it over he reached the conclusion that Olyrrwd regretted not making up his quarrel with Ossiam. Perhaps his urging Herrwn to “watch out” was not necessarily a start of his old admonitions that “Ossie is up to something” but the beginning of some thought concerning Ossiam’s welfare.

Herrwn’s belief in his cousins’ reconciliation was strengthened by the eloquence of Ossiam’s elegy for Olyrrwd and the passion with which it was given.

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As chief priest, Herrwn was to have given the main eulogy for Olyrrwd, but when the time came for him to step forward and stand before the gilded litter with its sheaths of fresh and dried herbs covering over the shrouded mound—a shape so much smaller than Olyrrwd had seemed in life—his legs would not move. Instead of obeying his clear command, they shook beneath him, and they would have given way entirely if Caelym hadn’t put a hand under his elbow to steady him and guide him into place.

Then his voice, like his legs, failed him. He could make his lips move, but nothing would come out. Again, Caelym came to his rescue. Speaking with bell-like clarity—but without any of his usual dramatic inflection—he summarized everything Herrwn wanted to say in a single sentence beginning, “If ever you need to remember that stature is more than height, that beauty is not in how you look but in what you see, and that wisdom is not in what you know but in what you ask,” and ending, “then you will only need to say one word, and that word is ‘Olyrrwd.’”

Ossiam spoke next. Stepping up to the altar, he raised his staff and proclaimed, “I stand before you not as your chief oracle but as the closest kinsman to he who lies before you.” At this he flung his staff aside, covered his face with both hands, and, sobbing, said through them, “He who is lost to my embrace.” Looking up, he thrust his arms skyward and shifted from tearful to triumphant as he sang out, “He who is now being welcomed into the next world, there to feast forever in the company of the eternal gods and goddesses!” He then dropped his voice, along with his arms, and, shaking his head, said, “Who am I … who are any of us … to wish him back from that so well-earned a reward?” before answering his rhetorical question, “I will not! And neither should you!” His voice strong and resonant again, the oracle spread both his hands in a gesture that encompassed the whole of his audience as he declared, “And yet he will live forever in my memory and in yours.”

What followed was a passionate litany of accolades and honorifics that might have been out of an ancient epic and recited over the grave of a fallen hero.

“Quite a fine fellow he must have been—wish I’d known him.” The words, spoken in Caelym’s voice but with the sardonic inflection that marked Olyrrwd’s gibes at what he’d called “Ossiam’s puffery” startled Herrwn. When he turned to look, Caelym seemed unaware that he had said anything, in fact had tears trickling down his own cheeks as Ossiam ended, in a broken voice, “I do not weep for him but for those of us left behind, bereft and brokenhearted.”

There was no other sign of it that day or in the months and years to follow, but just then, for a very brief moment, Herrwn thought it possible that—unwilling to leave his patients’ care to anyone else—Olyrrwd had somehow done what no one other than a chief priestess had done before: sent his spirit across the chasm between life and death to take up residence within his chosen heir.