Chapter 3: The Sacred Pools

They were standing on the edge of a steaming pool dotted with smooth, flat boulders, the smoothest and flattest of which lay in an almost straight line across to a wide ledge. That ledge was the lowest and widest of a series of shelves that rose, step-wise, into a white cloud that glowed mysteriously with seven pinpoints of light hovering in a line just above where Herrwn imagined the top of the highest ledge must be.

More pools filled the depressions and irregularities in the rocky shelves, connected by ribbons of water that spilled over from one ledge to the next. The banks on either side of the valley floor were covered with a profusion of plants. Some were familiar—ferns and reeds and horsetails—but others were strange, creeping vines that coiled around the trunks of trees and almost covered a long, low wooden hut set back from the edge of the main pool.

Herrwn’s father, who had not said anything to him or even looked back to check on him since they’d left the shrine’s main hall, turned around and straightened Herrwn’s robes, whispering, “We are at the Sacred Pools.”

The Sacred Pools!

It was all Herrwn could do to keep his expression somber and earnest as he pictured himself telling Olyrrwd and Ossiam that he’d been to the Sacred Pools.

Ordinarily not even the highest priests were permitted to go to the Sacred Pools—only priestesses and their women servants.

Every month, Herrwn’s mother would pack five days of clean clothes, kiss him, his brother, and his father goodbye, and leave with some of the other priestesses because, she said, “I need to rest and regain my strength.” Once, when Herrwn had seen her gathering her things together, he’d run up and down the shrine’s stairways until he was out of breath and then gone gasping to her, saying that he needed to rest and regain his strength too, but all he’d received for his efforts was to be sent to bed early.

When one of Herrwn’s girl cousins, who was only a few months older than he was, smugly packed her clothes and left with the grown-up priestesses, he’d protested to his father that it wasn’t fair that girls got to go to the Sacred Pools and boys didn’t. His father had been sitting in a corner of the shrine’s inner courtyard, talking with another priest who’d broken out in gales of laughter and fallen backward off his stool. Oddogwn picked himself up, brushed off his robes, and said, between wheezing gasps, “Oh, Little Herrwn, believe me when I tell you that you do not ever want to be there when women are resting and regaining their strength.”

Herrwn’s father, who had answered every question that Herrwn had ever asked him before, only said, “One day when you are grown and are some woman’s consort, you will understand.”

If he’d dared to move without permission—which he didn’t—Herrwn would have loved to test the water in the pool with his toe to see how hot it was. Instead, standing still at his father’s side, he waited until, finally, the oracle finished reciting another obscure chant and led the way across the pool, stepping from one dry stone to the next, his robes swishing around his feet, so it looked as if he were walking on the surface of the steaming water.

Keeping in an evenly spaced line and chanting a song usually sung at the winter solstice, the men wove back and forth from one ledge to the next.

As they reached the uppermost ledge, Herrwn saw the mist was rising from the base of a waterfall that plunged in a narrow stream from the cliff above and realized that what he had thought were lights floating in midair were the flames of candles held up by priestesses standing in a row, their gauzy white robes blending in with the mist around them. Their chief priestess, Eldrenedd, stood at the center, with Herrwn’s mother on her left side, Caelendra, his mother’s first cousin, on her right, and two lesser but still important priestesses on either side of them.

Following the oracle, the priests formed a semicircle facing the priestesses. The last rays of the setting sun turned the sky bright red. The water running around their feet and over the ledge behind them reflected the color overhead, making it seem as if they were surrounded by streams of blood. Suddenly, Herrwn didn’t want to be there anymore. He pulled on his father’s robe, trying to get his attention and his permission to go back to the nursery.

At that moment, the ancient chief priestess, who’d been glancing around the circle to make sure that everyone was in place, looked directly into Herrwn’s face and winked at him, as though to reassure him that everything would be all right.

Then she began to sing.

Herrwn had been learning songs and chants since he was six years old and he thought he knew them all, the ones sung on the shortest day of winter and the longest day of summer, on the night of the full moon and the night there was no moon, after the birth of the first lamb in the spring and before the cutting of the first sheaf of wheat in the fall, but he’d never heard this one before—or any song so filled with passion for the colors and textures and sounds of the living world. The words and the music made him want to climb trees and dance in meadows and run splashing through the Sacred Pools all at once.

As the song went on, a nearly full moon rose above the eastern ridge while the sun was setting in the west, and the reds and pinks around them faded into dark green and darker grays. The light of the moon reflected on the mist so that the air sparkled as if each drop of moisture were an infinitesimally small star, while the real stars came out to fill the sky overhead.

Then the song stopped.

Speaking in a voice that was suddenly old and weary, Eldrenedd sighed. “But now I must leave all this behind and bid you farewell.”

“No, please, don’t go!” a deep and resonant man’s voice rose up. It was Herrwn’s father, and as he sang out all the other priests joined him, pleading for her to stay.

The flood of joy that had welled up inside Herrwn vanished, leaving a vast, empty ache behind. It was a feeling he’d only had once before—the one and only time that he’d ever heard his mother and father arguing. He and his brother had listened from outside the doorway to their parents’ bedchamber, trembling, as his mother said that she was going to go back to live with her sisters (since Herrwn’s mother didn’t have any sisters, Herrwn had guessed she meant the quarters for the high priestesses without consorts). His father had pleaded with her not to leave him, promising that he would not fail her again. Herrwn had not heard the beginning of the dispute—and never did learn what it was about—but could feel the desperation in his father’s voice as he said, “I will do whatever you ask, if only you will stay!”

“We will do whatever you ask, if only you will stay!” was just what his father sang at that moment, and the chorus echoed his words in an overlapping chant that bounced off the cliff walls.

Those seemed to be the words that Eldrenedd was waiting for, because, in an altered tone, she sang, “Will you honor me, and will you be forever grateful to me for giving you life?”

“We will honor you, and we will be forever grateful to you for giving us life.”

“Will you keep a count of my days, and will you pay the tribute you owe to me and to my consorts and to all my divine children?”

“We will keep a count of your days, and we will pay the tribute we owe to you and to your consorts and to all of your divine children.”

The chant went back and forth as Eldrenedd extracted their pledge to carry on their traditions in the face of any adversity. Herrwn sang along with the rest, one part of his mind filling with hope and determination, the other part doubting, wondering how the old priestess who seemed barely strong enough to walk could keep her promise not to die.

Eldrenedd put out her hand.

The chanting stopped.

The priestesses who’d been spread out on either side of her came together into a circle. Eldrenedd looked to her left—at Herrwn’s mother—but her gaze moved on, looking into the face of each of the six priestesses in turn, until she got to Caelendra.

For a long moment, no one breathed. Then Eldrenedd closed her eyes. The candle that she was holding went out, and the candle that Caelendra was holding flared up brighter, and Caelendra, who was unusually tall for a woman, seemed to grow even taller before Herrwn’s eyes.

Herrwn’s father went down to his knees, and Herrwn, along with the rest of the priests, did too.

Lifting her candle high over her head with her left hand, Caelendra beckoned for them to rise with her right.

“You, Herrwn,” she said, looking at Herrwn’s father and speaking in a voice as soft and gentle as a mother comforting a frightened child. “Will you be my chief priest and master bard—giving me your wise counsel and telling the great legends of our past?”

“I will.” Herrwn’s father spoke in an equally soft voice that was somehow still strong and resolute.

“And you, Olyrrond …”

Caelendra went on to ask for and receive promises from each of the other priests. Then, she lowered her candle, spread her arms in a gesture that seemed to embrace them all, and said with surprising simplicity, “Thank you.”

With that, Herrwn’s father began the chant Herrwn knew from the daily sunrise ritual, and one after another of the priests and priestesses joined in. After the last note died away, Caelendra led them back down the way they came—all of them walking in a steady line, except for the old priestess, who was barely breathing and had to be carried by one of the younger priests.