PART I Tales of the Hunt

“Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter,” is an African proverb quoted by the eminent Nigerian author and scholar Chinua Achebe, in an interview with Paris Review in 1994. Its applicability to the Druids of Northern Europe is manifest. Having left no written records, their early portrayals come from the accounts of foreign and often hostile commentators, while later depictions were the work of Christian authors intending to replace Druidic ideas with their own. It is not surprising, then, that by the eighth century, the priests and priestesses who had once been accorded a reverence bordering on worship were publicly reviled as sorcerers and witches.

That said, the superstitious dread of Druids that infected the Christians of that period was out of proportion with any apparent threat posed by a frail old man wrapped in a travel-stained cloak crouching on a rocky ledge overlooking the valley that encompassed what was then the Saxon kingdom of Derthwald.

In the wider scheme of things, Derthwald was a small kingdom, but to Herrwn, who’d rarely before been outside a valley barely four leagues long and only two across, the moonlit mix of woods and fields below him was a vast expanse almost dizzying in its immensity.

A sharp wind cut through his cloak and the robe beneath, both still damp from the downpour earlier that day, so the shiver that momentarily came over him was more likely from cold and hunger than a lack of personal fortitude. Still, physical hardship was a new experience for Herrwn. Until the unspeakable betrayal that laid open the entry of their previously secure sanctuary to their enemies, he’d led a privileged life—the life of a teacher and a poet within the shelter of a community that valued learning and poetry above gold. While this preferential treatment had not protected him from the aches of old age or the pain of outliving all his family and most of his friends, he had been spared much of the discomfort of living in a time that later generations would call the Dark Ages—although he would have been offended if he had heard the term and understood the implications that his time was a time of ignorance and depravity.

Having devoted his life to reciting the sagas that contained the ancient wisdom passed down to him from his father and his father’s father going back to the night the first of those stories was told by the first storyteller, Herrwn would have expected more appreciation for his labors. Of course, the penchant of the young for giving themselves entirely too much credit was nothing new to a man who’d been a teacher for over forty years, and Herrwn would have considered anyone born in our time—twelve centuries after he was—to be very young indeed.

In the unlikely event that he had been able to do so, he would have been ready to answer the criticisms of those yet-to-be born scholars who had the conceit to pass such an ill-founded judgment on their elders. He would have straightened himself up to his full height, fixed the upstarts with the stern gaze that had subdued two generations of unruly disciples, and spoken with grave dignity as he challenged them to prove the boast that their age was better than earlier ones.

“So, I am to understand that in your time the wealthy gladly share their excess goods with the poor and the needy? And it must also be true that your rulers act only out of selfless consideration of what is best for those that they govern? And, certainly, in such advanced and civilized days, men do not resort to the crudeness of war to make their point but use reason and the thoughtful exchange of words instead!”

Here Herrwn would have paused to wait for the feeble rebuttal to sputter out before demanding to know whether all the wondrous advances of the future had served to make men and women more generous or more loving or more content—and exactly how they could be so certain that generosity or love or contentment had never been felt by those who lived in earlier times. Then he would have finished with a polite but pointed suggestion that “perhaps, instead of complaining about the flaws of other times, you should be putting your thoughts and actions into improving your own!”

Druids were like that—always ready to talk their opponents into submission on any topic whatsoever. And despite his shabby outward appearance, Herrwn was a Druid—and not just any Druid but a Druid born to the highest ranks of his elite order, descended from an unbroken line of Druids going back to the days when all of Britain worshipped the Great Mother Goddess and her ever-expanding family of divine offspring.

It was his ancestors who first chanted the sacred chants and danced the sacred dances celebrating the power of the Goddess, their bards who first recited the sagas recalling how the struggles between the Goddess’s many children had shaped the world, their oracles who first foretold the future by augury and divination.

Even after other shrines sprang up in more accessible locations, theirs had held ascendency. The most important kings and queens did not marry without consulting with their high priestess, the greatest warriors did not go to war without the approval of their council, and the wisest farmers did not plant their crops before the day decreed by their calendar.

Secure in their primary position and elevated standing, they’d been tolerant when competing centers, out of either sincere misapprehension or unwitting envy, began to question their authority in determining the proper names, relative ranking, and exact powers of the vast and complex array of divine beings that had sprung from the Goddess’s fertile loins.

The disputes, which at first had seemed no more serious than arguments over the merits of contestants in the footraces held at the summer solstice celebration, turned ominous when a rebellious faction of younger priests put forth the observation that men were bigger and stronger than women as evidence that gods must be more powerful and more important than goddesses.

This challenge to conventional wisdom was compounded by uncertainty about just how many gods and goddesses there actually were—a question that was only raised by common laborers complaining about the rising costs of placating the steadily increasing number of easily offended divinities before the invading Romans unleashed a whole new pantheon onto the lands they conquered. (The answer to this, of course, was, “So many that only someone with the highly trained memory of a Druid could keep track of them all.”)

Herrwn’s sect, the Shrine of the Great Mother Goddess, was, as its name implied, a conservative school of thought. Steadfast in upholding the preeminent role of the Mother Goddess both in the creation and the oversight of the world and unwilling to get caught up in what seemed to them to be juvenile squabbling, its chief priests restated the obvious—“All life begins with a mother”—and continued on with their own affairs.

Safely situated above the furthest reach of the Roman occupation, their shrine remained a prominent center of Druid belief and practice until a new and even more dangerous idea was put forth—first behind closed doors, then offhandedly at informal gatherings of priests-in-training, and finally out loud in open councils—and what began as a grassroots movement of the lower classes responding to the appeal of a simple idea of a single god, one who cared about the poor and maybe wouldn’t expect so much tribute, took hold and spread like wildfire.

Well aware of the arguments for monotheism, the high priests of their cult had stood firm, saying, “You get what you pay for,” and adding that what the converts to Christianity would get was one god who was every bit as demanding as a thousand had ever been but who wouldn’t share with anyone else. It was Herrwn’s great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather who’d answered the claim by proselytizing Christians that having one god was better than many, scoffing, “By that reasoning, having no gods or goddesses would be best of all.” But neither humor nor reason prevailed, and almost overnight, the steady stream of tribute that had sustained their shrine for the past millennium dried up to a trickle.

As the tide of public opinion turned against them, they retreated from their original shrine to take refuge in an even more remote sanctuary that had previously been reserved for conducting their four highest seasonal rituals.

By the time the Romans were replaced by a second wave of foreign invaders, the schism between adherents of the old religion and the new one had grown so intense that there were some priests sitting on the shrine’s highest council who considered the Saxons being polytheists to count in their favor. This guarded optimism faded, however, as it became apparent that the Saxons were undiscriminating in their warfare—killing fellow pagans as remorselessly as Christians.

With the eventual conversion of Saxons, the question of one god or many was largely resolved in favor of Jesus Christ, and while the widespread adoption of Christianity did not bring universal peace or justice, it did bring converted Saxons and Celts together to persecute nonbelievers of either race.

In spite of this growing hostility, the Druids of Llwddawanden had not yet been completely cut off from the outside world. They continued to meet with their relatives who’d become Christian for another two generations, although their family reunions had deteriorated into occasions for name-calling and acrimony by the time Herrwn was born. Then, the year that he turned eight, a delegation, led by his father and including his father’s four brothers, went out for what was to be the last time. They left Llwddawanden expecting to be gone for at least ten days. They returned a week later with only half their number, and their kinship—which had remained intact in spite of all the arguments over the ranks and responsibilities of a thousand gods and goddesses—was permanently torn apart.

Of all Herrwn’s childhood memories, the most vivid would always be the image of his calm, thoughtful father—a man known for his patience and open-mindedness, for his readiness to offer a sympathetic excuse for the bad behavior of others, and for his ability to smooth over rancorous disputes in the High Council—stamping in a circle around the sacred hearth, fuming and sputtering, repeating over and over how it was a travesty and an abomination that those who had once been their flesh and blood should spew the disgraceful, repellent falsehood that it was not the Great Mother Goddess who gave them life (as if you could look anywhere and find any creature that is born without a mother!) but instead chose to worship a despicable Christian god who claimed to have created the first man out of mud and the first woman out of the man’s rib!

Huddled out of sight behind the back row of the benches in the great council chamber with his little brother and two of their cousins, Herrwn had stared in bewilderment at his father and uncles, the three highest priests on their highest council, almost incoherent with outrage, declaring that his two missing uncles were no longer kin and were never to be called by name again.

One of his uncles had a lively sense of humor and turned their outrage into laughter by pulling open his robe and counting his ribs and exclaiming in mock surprise that none were missing! The other two (usually dignified) men followed suit, each of them opening their robes and counting their ribs and trying to persuade Herrwn’s mother and aunts to let their ribs be counted. Caught up in the game, Herrwn had pulled up his own shirt and counted his ribs, and then helped his brother to count his. The younger boy was ticklish and had fallen to the floor in uncontrollable peals of laughter and been left with a bad case of hiccups. Except for that, they all felt better, having proved that the number of ribs for men and for women was exactly the same and so settling, once and for all, that life was a gift from the Great Mother Goddess in whom they correctly believed!

With that, Herrwn’s father and uncles agreed that while there was room in the world for a large and perhaps uncountable number of gods and goddesses, there was no place in their shrine for any god who claimed credit for the work of others.

Herrwn’s mother and aunts did not need to be convinced. They had each given birth themselves and shared the view that men could never endure menstrual cramps, much less childbirth. It was Herrwn’s mother who had the last word, startling them all by saying there might be some basis for Christian belief because (and she paused for effect), in the unlikely event that a male god were to give life, he would certainly do it in a way which did not require any real labor or discomfort for himself.

By then they all were in complete agreement not to demean themselves arguing over foolishness and decided that they would refuse to discuss the matter further and would wait for the absent uncles to return to their senses.

In the decades that passed since then, Herrwn and his cousins had risen to take their fathers’ places as the shrine’s chief bard, oracle, and physician, and, together with the shrine’s highest priestesses, they had continued to recite their ancient sagas, conduct their arcane rituals, and view themselves as the firstborn and favorite of the Goddess’s mortal children.

The belief that the most important of all divine spirits had personally given birth to their ancestors, and that She continued to like them better than anyone else, was at best a tenuous conclusion in view of their reduced lot in life, but the Druids of Llwddawanden believed it. Dismissing the challenges of hostile armies and competing doctrines, they remained secure in their conviction that the living spirit of the Great Mother Goddess inhabited the body of their highest priestess—changing in form from tall to short, from svelte to voluptuous, from blond to dark as she passed from one generation to the next.

It had briefly seemed their faith might be rewarded when the ascendance of a mesmerizingly beautiful chief priestess brought the return of enthusiastic worshippers and their valley’s population swelled—but that revival ended in catastrophe when her charismatic consort led his fanatically loyal but tragically ill-prepared band of would-be warriors in a doomed charge against a Saxon army.

In the fifteen years since that defeat, few children had been born, and the old had continued to die, so when their secret location was betrayed by one of their own, there were only a handful of them left to flee for other shelter. Still, the choice of staying faithful to the Goddess remained, and Herrwn had made it with his eyes open. It was a decision over which he had no regrets and one that gave him an inner strength beyond anything one would expect in a man of his age whose worldly possessions amounted to no more than what he could carry on his back.