Chapter 58: The Task

Late-season storms continued to batter the valley, adding to Herrwn’s misgivings about Caelym’s going on his spirit quest that year, but each time he tried to suggest putting it off, Caelym turned to Olyrrwd and Olyrrwd said, “No weather is bad weather so long as you are prepared for it.”

Possibly to reassure himself, Olyrrwd said those exact words again while he and Herrwn were waiting for Caelym to finish his final cleansing bath, don his ceremonial robes, and emerge from the priests’ bath chamber ready to leave for the Sacred Grove.

The shutters were closed and the priests’ quarters were lit with a single candle, symbolizing the concept that in venturing out first to the shrine’s Sacred Grove, where the chief oracle would carry out the augury divining the initiate’s quest, and then up into the equally sacred northern mountains to accomplish that task and acquire his spirit guide, Caelym was leaving the limited vision of an ordinary priest for the limitless horizon of a disciple on the path to ultimate wisdom.

Standing with Olyrrwd in the darkened classroom, Herrwn was reminded of Caelym’s arrival there—shrieking and kicking—ten years earlier. This time, however, the shrill screams were the winds outside the window and the banging was the shutters being pounded by hail stones.

“I am ready!” Despite the storm outside, Caelym’s voice resounded with excitement when he swung open the great double doors—scrubbed, perfumed, and radiant in the robes that Herrwn had worn on his own Divining Day.

Olyrrwd nodded proudly. He shouldered the healer’s bag, which was as much the symbol of his rank as the shrine’s chief physician as Herrwn’s staff was the symbol of his as their chief bard, and gripped his walking sticks—looking as eager as if he were starting the journey along with Caelym.

With a final glance at the bulging pack that Olyrrwd had assured him held everything Caelym would need for his adventure, Herrwn took up his staff and led the way out of the shrine and through what was now a veritable gale of freezing rain to the altar, where Ossiam and the rest of the priests and priestesses were already gathered.

Even in the relative shelter of the grove, hail pelleted down through the branches of the towering oaks, and a cutting wind tore at Herrwn’s cloak and robes as he raised his staff, signaling for the ceremony to begin.

Whether the goat being dragged to the altar was shaking from fear or cold, it seemed too numb to struggle when it was lifted onto the stone slab. After its last tremors were over and its entrails had begun to darken, Ossiam continued to stare down at them. His audience pulled their cloaks tighter as they waited for the more or less expected proclamation that Caelym was to climb to the top of a mountain, recite incantations calling on his spirit guide to reveal itself to him in a dream, and go to sleep in order to have the dream.

Looking up, Ossiam opened his mouth, closed it, then opened and closed it again. Clenching his jaw, he gripped the edge of the altar. His whole body shuddered. For a third time, his mouth opened, and out of it the voice of the female spirit from the other world who’d been quiescent for almost five years shrieked, “He must go now, at once, into the mountains to seek his animal spirit guide! He must go on this journey as animals go, without human clothes or weapons! He may not return until he has learned to speak the language of his animal spirit’s tribe and to sing their songs and tell their stories!”

With that, Ossiam’s mouth snapped shut, his head sagged, and he collapsed to his knees. As his two assistant priests rushed to his aid, the priests and priestesses circled around the altar gave a collective gasp. Even if humans and animals could still talk to each other, which they could not, going into the mountains in this storm without clothes or tools or a flint was not a quest—it was a death sentence.

Herrwn thought fast. As the shrine’s chief priest, he could override Ossiam in ordinary circumstances—a dispute at the dinner table or a debate in the council—but that authority had never, to his knowledge, been raised or tested when an oracle was making a divined pronouncement. It was a question even more complicated in this case, since it was not Ossiam himself who was speaking but the female spirit from the other world. The answer presumably hinged on the rank that spirit held, but while Ossiam had frequently alluded to the importance of the affairs his female familiar had in the realm beyond death when he explained her erratic entrances and exits, her precise position in the pantheon of divine beings was shrouded in mystery and remained unknown to anyone except, possibly, Ossiam himself.

With no way to resolve those questions short of a meeting of the High Council, Herrwn made up his mind. He would refuse his consent to allow his disciple to accept this quest. Whatever the consequences in this world or the next, they would be his and not Caelym’s. He was lifting his staff for the crowd’s attention, but before he could speak, Olyrrwd stepped forward to address the still-kneeling Caelym in the matter-of-fact voice he used in describing the treatment of a troublesome fever.

“But, of course, as animals have hide and fur, you will go dressed in leather and a fur cloak. And as animals have fangs and claws, you will go armed with a knife and spear. And as you are my disciple, not even the spirit of she who speaks through the lips of our great oracle will object to your going forth bearing a token of our sacred order.”

Caelym, who’d remained uncharacteristically silent until then, spoke up, sounding very much his buoyant and enthusiastic self. “I will embark on the quest that has been divined for me to seek my animal spirit guide, and I vow that I will return having learned to speak the language of its tribe and to sing their songs and tell their stories!”

Rising up smoothly, as if in a long-practiced rite, he cast off his priestly robes to reveal that he was already dressed in snug-fitting deerskin garb, and instead of sandals he was wearing thick leather boots. Stepping away from the altar, he donned a fur-lined tunic and cloak that, as it turned out, Olyrrwd had been holding in a bundle under his own cloak, and then knelt down again and reverently held out his hands, palms up, to take the healer’s bag that Olyrrwd presented with the grave pronouncement, “With this, the token of our sacred orders, I give you my blessing on the sacred task you have been given.”

Of all the gathered priests and priestesses, only Herrwn was close enough to hear what Olyrrwd whispered to Caelym while handing him the bulging satchel—“Animals also have dens, and they have the wisdom to go to them, curl up, and stay dry when it rains.” This sounded more like a specific instruction than a formal blessing, but Caelym seemed as heartened by Olyrrwd’s parting words as Herrwn had been by his father’s benediction—“Seek high, sleep deep, and dream well, my son, and may the Great Goddess watch over you as your mother would”—on the day he set off on his own spirit quest.

Still on his knees, Caelym was close to eye level with Olyrrwd, and the two exchanged a long look before Caelym rose to his feet again, bowed reverently to Feywn, waved cheerfully to the five young priestesses, and went skipping merrily off through the rain.

By then even Feywn, though standing under a canopy held up by her servants, was soaked, her thick woolen cape dripping water from its hem. She’d been silent throughout the ritual and remained silent now, as she raised her hand to signal that the ceremony was over and turned to lead the way back to the shrine. Ossiam, supported on either side by Iddwran and Ogdwen, staggered after her. Olyrrwd elbowed ahead of Herrwn to get in line next, hardly leaning on his walking sticks at all and humming a tune under his breath that Herrwn recognized as the refrain of a song he had made up years before to annoy Ossiam in the midst of a dispute.

Herrwn cast a final glance over his shoulder in the direction of the path Caelym had taken, murmured his father’s blessing, and fell into the line hurrying to the shelter of the shrine.

Back in their bedchamber, as Herrwn and Olyrrwd were changing into their dry robes, Herrwn ventured to wonder aloud whether the cedar branch shelters Caelym had practiced making during the past weeks happened to be located along the route he’d be taking out of the valley and into the northern mountains.

“Well, where else?” Olyrrwd answered cheerfully, apparently unconcerned about the severity of the weather or the fact that Caelym hadn’t taken the backpack with extra clothes and supplies or his bow and arrows or fishing spears.

“No point in being weighed down with an overloaded pack,” he went on in as jovial a voice as Herrwn had heard him use in years, adding, “Besides, it’s half the fu—spiritual growth—to live on your wits and skill.”

“But the task …” Even as he spoke the word, Herrwn shivered at the memory of the harsh voice of Ossiam’s female spirit shrieking that Caelym’s task was to learn to speak the language of his animal spirit’s tribe.

Olyrrwd shook his head in mock consternation. “Herrwn, revered elder cousin, you who are our shrine’s chief priest and master bard, I cannot believe that you of all people should have to be reminded that it was the animal tribes who, for entirely understandable reasons, vowed never to speak in human language ever again—or that there is nothing in any version of the tales to say that humans cannot learn to speak the language of animals. I myself can say without boasting that I am quite fluent in cat, dog, and owl, as well as being reasonably conversant in raven and squirrel.”

With a smug grin, Olyrrwd sauntered off, his walking sticks under his arm, whistling the tune he’d hummed on his way back from the Sacred Grove, as cocky as if he’d just won a hard-fought game of Stones.