Wheel of the Year

“Raspberry leaves. Steep them in a tea every night when the moon is waxing.”

I cupped my hands together, and she dropped the gift into my open palms—enough dried raspberry leaves to make a month’s worth of tea, tied tightly into a hemp bag. “Thank you, Grandmother.” I smiled.

“You’re not afraid, my darling, are you?” she asked as she crossed the small roundhouse to her hearth. She continued grinding herbs on her stone table and dividing them among the wooden bowls lined up along the edge.

“What happened to your mother in childbed is not your destiny,” she said as I dropped the hemp bag into the larger hide pocket I wore tied around my waist, under my Druid cloak, for gathering.

“I know. The gods just haven’t blessed us in these last ten months,” I answered quietly, rubbing my sweating palms on my wool cloak. And that was true, for the most part. Aric had spent most of the recent warm months traveling for necessary trades and exploration, as was his role, just like when he had escorted us to Orkney two years earlier. The winter after our wedding had of course kept him here for a long honeymoon, but we had been timid to get to know one another in those first few months, and I could easily count the number of times we reluctantly and delicately lay together.

“Well, then you’ll know what the village gossip is about the healer’s granddaughter not conceiving?” She laughed without looking up at me, but it didn’t sound like she thought it very funny. “Now everyone wants to know what a strong concoction you must be taking to prevent being with child by a man like Aric?”

I flushed the color of the raspberries that she had separated from their leaves for the tea and involuntarily put my hand to the pocket tied around my waist.

“Well, everyone knows Aric is capable of making a child because his first wife was pregnant when she succumbed to her illness, so maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m incapable.” Something invisible grabbed my throat and would not let go. I could barely swallow.

Grandmother looked up at me then and smiled. “You will give him happiness, Ailsa, I’m sure. As soon as you are done with your little stockpile of dauco seeds. I suppose they will buy you some time to be ready.”

I wanted to ask her how she knew that I was taking wild carrot seeds to stifle my fertility. Had she seen me gathering? Did she go through my pocket when it was untied while I was bathing or sleeping? I had been spending much of my time at Grandmother’s house since moving into Aric’s roundhouse. I felt lonely with him gone so much through the summer, when the weather was warmer for boating to the nearby islands. He came back every six weeks or so with gifts for me—new seeds to plant, pretty seashells from the beaches he had landed on, and exciting stories about the people he had met.

But now I was regretting the decision to stay with her, wondering if a bit of solitude might be beneficial. So instead of acknowledging her accuracy and admitting she had me figured out with the dauco seeds, I decided to avoid it altogether while I gathered my thoughts.

“I’m going to go check on the smokehouse, but I’ll be back for dinner. That stew smells too good to miss, and Aric won’t be back until until Samhain tomorrow.” Grandmother nodded, smiling her knowing smile. “Men aren’t meant to be still, I suppose.”

“Neither am I.” I mumbled mostly to myself as I took off to see that all our fish was being properly smoked for the coming winter. Ocean fishing would still be available to the brave souls who ventured out in the weather, but the lakes and river would deep-freeze this winter. All the Druids said so, and I could feel it in the chill that had finally begun take hold after an unusually warm harvest season.

Wearing clothes into a smokehouse is a very unwise decision if one does not want to smell like a smoked trout for the rest of eternity, so I took advantage of being alone, and I stripped down and hung my cloak, pocket, and dress on a nearby tree limb. I slipped out of my shoes, which I rarely wore, except on the coldest of nights, just before entering the little wooden house to stoke the embers of the smoke source. The heat felt wonderful, and my shoulders relaxed in comfort. I crouched, looking into the glowing embers, thinking about the sauna sessions Ray, Jord, and I had had with the northerners on Orkney Island. They had seen things in the smoke and embers, things that felt so real at the time, and now it all felt like a dream.

On the way back from Orkney, Ray and Jord had told me that I would need to marry to continue the pure Druidic lineage I had come from. If I didn’t have an idea of who that should be, they offered for the counsel to choose for me. That was two years before, and I was finally coming to terms with the future that was decided on that trip. I was a Druid, and Druids weren’t typically expected to have children like the rest of the village, so it was never something I had considered. But Druids were also not bound to chastity, and marrying Aric was a great honor. He was a humble warrior who had lost his first wife when they were both very young. I had come to see my relationship with Aric as a duty intertwined with my Druidic rites, and I had come to terms with what it meant to honor that duty through marriage. I had not yet come to terms, after less than a year of marriage and just over a year of leading our ceremonial rites, with the fact that having and raising his child was also part of that. Regardless of my hesitation in becoming a mother, I wanted to do both of these duties well, mothering and leading the Druids, and in this moment that seemed practically impossible.

I longed for the androgyny that some of the other Druids enjoyed. Not being tied to the gendered expectations of a wife and mother made spiritual focus much easier, I surmised. I was seventeen and a half when Aric and I had married the previous winter, but I had been raised to Druidism longer than I could remember. That part of me felt easier and more accessible than “wife” and “mother.” And it carried less past trauma. I hadn’t grown up with a mother, nor had my father ever remarried before his own death, and grandmother’s husband had long perished before I came along, life expectancy being what it is here. I hadn’t really been part of a functioning mother/father/child family of my own, other than Ros’s. But that wasn’t mine. He wasn’t mine. Druidism was less complicated in some ways. It was what I understood, what I felt was not only my purpose but also my family.

I felt drops of sweat form underneath my shoulder blades and on the small of my back as they began to trickle down. I wiped my watering eyes to try to clear my blurry vision. “It’s just the smoke,” I told myself out loud. It was. But then I really wanted to cry. I felt it bubble up in me for the first time in ages. I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried, though I searched for it in my memory. At that moment the sweat dripping down my back turned cool and a shiver went down my whole body as icy hands wrapped around my waist.

“Found you!” Ros whispered in my ear. “I’ve been pacing around peeking in every doorway, and I had given up tracking you until I saw your old, tattered shoes sitting right outside the smokehouse.” He smiled, laughing into my face, just a hair’s breadth away, our noses practically touching. “What’s the point in wearing those? They can’t keep your feet warm.”

I stared at him in disbelief, after months of another long absence from the island, testing new sail technology on the open sea, my mouth slightly agape. He gave me a worried look and continued, “I couldn’t really see your skinny little back because of all the smoke when I walked in, but then I heard you sniffling by the fire.” He started to cough. You can’t really talk in a smokehouse, or you end up inhaling too much smoke. I saw him realize this as he coughed and spit out a black residue. He noticed me shaking my head, silently laughing at him, and he bent toward me, hand on my lower back, and whispered, “I don’t know if this some Druid ritual, but the fish look like they need some more time, so come outside and talk to me.”

He was out of the door in a dash but not before planting a lingering kiss next to my earlobe. His touch felt so refreshingly cool, like the ocean on a hot day. This felt too familiar, a piece of our childhood, yet startling at the same time. I hadn’t seen Ros much in the ten months since my wedding. He had been out testing boats and exploring further shores for both ideas and hard materials for his boat building. It was a convenient time for him to be gone. I felt my body and soul ache for my best friend, the one person who really knew me, and I realized for the first time that maybe his long and impeccably timed absence was a part of the loneliness I had been feeling for the last year. Ray had stepped in fully as my confidant lately, and truly his presence was so full of warmth and wisdom that it had sufficed as my only friendship through the winter, spring, and summer that had passed.

I slipped out of the smokehouse, covering my breasts with sweaty palms, and Ros wrapped my green Druid cloak around me immediately while carrying my dress in his hands, even picking up my disintegrating shoes and holding them in the crook of his arm because he knew I would prefer to be barefoot. How many times had he seen me naked throughout our lives together? Babes at the breast together, children without clothes during summer play, teenagers skinny-dipping in the ocean. But it was different now. Now I felt naked in front of him.

“You know, your parents were the closest example of a husband and wife I had as a child,” I told him, flatly and very much out of the blue for him. He seemed blown away by this information but took it in stride.

“I guess that’s true,” he said matter-of-factly, “but I am wondering what made you think of it just now.” I was walking at my usual fast clip, and Ros picked up his pace a bit to reach mine. “Are we headed to the oak grove?”

We walked in companionable silence until we reached the edge of the woods. The night was cooling quickly. The first frost was upon us. I could smell it in the air. It was the smell of the trees preparing for it, reaching way down to their roots to gain strength for it.

“Well, the talk among the sailors is that Aric is quite pleased with you, my dear,” Ros responded. I blushed, but he continued. “And let me tell you how much I enjoy working on their boats while they talk about you like that.”

We walked in silence for a moment. “It’s hard for you to think of me like that?” I asked him.

He looked back at me puzzled, then smiled his sly and perfect smile. “What? No. All I do is think about you like that, Ailsa. In fact, that’s why I’ve been looking for you.”

We approached my oak tree, and as Ros moved back a heavy branch laden with golden leaves for us to walk under, we were showered with shades of orange, yellow, and gold that matched his hair. I knew that Ros’s feelings about us had grown complicated, but my mind was filled with enough confusion at the moment. I decided on more avoidance. “I need to talk about me right now. And what I’m going through. Not you. It’s my turn to say how I feel. You spoke at my wedding, now let me.”

He looked down, abashed, but to his credit, breathed deeply once and looked up to meet my deliberate stare. He saw that, after many months of his prolonged absence, I needed my friend. The friendship that he had had no choice over since birth. I was once a starving three-month-old, thrust on him by his loving mother and my stubborn grandmother. And now, eighteen years later, I was asking him to put me first again. I had never dared ask that before, but he accepted with grace belying his years. It was the grace of true friendship, a chord that struck deeper than love, and I would never forget how he was there for me that night, when I needed to be heard. So we sat under the great oak, and I rested my head on the huge knot just below the hole created by the lightning strike, and we talked for hours that felt like no time at all.

Dark was approaching quickly as we exited the wood; it was on our heels as we headed toward my grandmother’s house. I asked Ros to stay for dinner as I took my shoes from him, the night air having grown too cold to walk without them. He still held my dress in his hands, though I was wrapped tightly in my green wool Druid’s cloak, which flowed behind me, long enough to drag the ground. As we came to Grandmother’s house, a dark figure came into view in the doorway, filling up far more of it than grandmother would have. It ducked to fit inside, and I gasped, realizing it had to be Aric. “Oh, good,” I heard Ros say sarcastically. I sped up and ran toward grandmother’s door, wide-eyed.

“I thought you were arriving tomorrow,” I said as I walked under the hide right behind him. Aric smiled down at me but quickly caught sight of Ros behind me and realized that I was clutching my cloak closed, naked underneath.

“The gales were in our favor this time and pushed us toward home with haste,” he said, stroking the smooth back of my black hair. He made eye contact with Ros, who had joined us by grandmother’s hearth, clearly not excited to see my husband. When grandmother turned around from the stew pot and saw Ros come up and stand behind me, her eyes bulged out of her head “Oh, I can see why the wind was in a hurry.” she jabbed, and I cut my eyes at her.

“I figured you would be sleeping over with Grandmother,” Aric added, “And so here you are. I guess I do know my wife.” He said without taking his eyes off of Ros.

He grabbed my dress out of Ros’s grasp with one huge fist. “Let’s go home and go to bed, my love; it’s late, and I’m weary from my travels.” He said this without looking at me, looking down at my dress, holding it in one hand.

“But I don’t have anything for you to eat,” I rebutted quickly, not willing to be dragged away from the warmth of my grandmother’s hearth and my best friend’s listening ear. I felt a tad conspicuous and continued, “There’s some fish in the smokehouse. I guess I could—”

“No, no.” Grandmother cut me off. Thankfully. “There’s plenty of stew. Please stay.” She hesitated and then added, “All of you.” She shot Ros a hot look but could not deny her own hospitality.

“The fish isn’t ready anyway,” Ros added, placing a hand on my shoulder and massaging it lightly. “Remember, Ailsa, we just checked it?”

“Shouldn’t you see to the boats that have just arrived?” Aric asked him in an unusually irritated tone.

“First thing in the morning,” Ros retorted as he smiled, bent down, kissed my grandmother, who looked annoyed yet charmed by his escapades, and made his way toward the hearth.

Grandmother’s hearth was in the center of the roundhouse, as was traditional in the older homes of the village, with mounds of hides and furs piled up around us and a multitude of pillows filled with goose feathers and wrapped in thick furs so that the pointy ends didn’t stick out and poke you. Everything was soft and comfortable with age, treated with the sweetest smelling oil of rose, clary sage, and lavender, which made you want to drift right off to sleep. But the senses were aroused by the botanical smell of the dozens of herbs hanging overhead in various states of drying, mingled with the earthy smell of grain on the quern and chicory tea and meat stew on the fire.

Ros leaned on a giant mound of hides across the fire from me; his flint spade used for digging out boats was laid, ever so suggestively, over his lap, his legs extended and crossed at the ankles, his arms stretched out in full wingspan across the back cushions. He had seated himself in the perfect place to watch me, and so I found myself feeling self-conscious, seated cross-legged on a black fur, several pillows propped up behind me and Aric leaning back, one arm spread behind my back and the other hand on his ale cup. Suddenly not knowing how to be, utterly aware of myself in the presence of these two men in a way I had never been before, I found myself feeling awkward, trying to casually lie back against Aric’s arm, as if it were natural to be held by my husband like this. I looked at him and smiled, into the fire, over at Grandmother, anything to avoid Ros’s piercing gaze. Grandmother seemed not to notice any of it, humming away, stoking the fire, and stirring the pots over it. She offered each of us an herbal tea concoction from her earthenware and then sat cross-legged with us, her eyes creased in satisfaction at this impromptu gathering around her fire.

The tea was strong and soothing, and as I sipped it in silence, I felt the house darken and close in around me, as if we were in a cozy cave. The voices of my husband, my best friend, and my grandmother seemed to echo around me to amplify this effect. I stopped wondering whether my head was sitting neatly erect over my body or whether it was cupped in the curve between Aric’s bicep and breast. I was lost in the familiarity of the love enveloping me, and a calm surged over me, like a wave I was not ready for. After ten months of marriage, despite some distance, Aric’s voice was beginning to join that chorus of sweet, recognizable sounds. It made me remember being a girl, falling asleep to the sound of my father talking to my grandmother. She had loved him as her own, though he was a foreigner, and even more so because my mother had died. Aric was also a foreigner, and I wondered, not for the first time, if he felt the same pangs of loneliness without his family of origin.

I felt my heart softening with the thought. I had spent my entire life—thus far—in love with one person, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel compassion for this man, my husband, gruff as he was. I felt his beard scratch the top of my head and realized I was leaning against him, listening to Ros and grandmother exchange stories from the harbor. We lived on an island off of a bigger island, and to the north were dozens of smaller islands. Some were permanently inhabited; others were only inhabited by animals, just providing a place for a fire, rest, and replenishment from the wilds of the sea. Ros built boats like his father and grandfather before him, and the technology was evolving rapidly from the spread of ideas and designs. Boats came to represent the village society and the warriors themselves, so everyone wanted the largest and strongest. Luckily, our forests provided plenty of lumber for such endeavors and we sailed constantly, gathering stories, goods, and new villagers along the way.

Ros was a different kind of boat maker. He could look at a boat from a distance, as it came into dock, and note all of the details—the sail material, the weight, the shape of the hull, and the exact height of the bow and stern. He had drawings of massive ships that he had been working on since we were eleven. He said they would go farther than anyone had yet imagined.

Ros’s memory was also built for stories, especially the bawdy ones told by the sailors of the seas that he met down on the beach. Hearing details of the lives of people from neighboring islands and places even farther away was always exciting, but not for the obvious reasons. The stories of intrigue—stolen boats, angry shamans, wild boar, rough seas, and long nights searching for land—had kept me riveted for the last decade of my life; Ros and I shared the temptation to go and explore for ourselves. But now I was a Druid and a wife, and what intrigued me the most about the stories was how similar these foreigners seemed to us, how much we shared, and how I felt so connected to them through the vastness of the world we inhabited. I had come to imagine them more as family than as strange and exotic.

We sipped our tea until it was gone, and without my even realizing it, our drinks became wine, poured for me and Aric from a leather flagon that he wore, fastened with leather and draped from his shoulder. Grandmother and Ros drank a sweeter, more aged honey wine that she poured from an earthenware vessel older than any of us.

Somewhere in the middle of Ros’s story of the battle of Chiefs Muir and Erlan the Great, I began to let myself drift, knowing that the singing would be coming soon, for what else could top this epic tale but a round of songs from Aric and Ros, deep enough into drink that they forgot their own differences and instead seemed to be competing with the village bard?

My favorite tales were the ones about the other stone circles and monuments and our brethren who were connected to us through them. There were a series of stone monuments on all the surrounding islands, constructed at different times but all with similar purpose and connection. I knew, through the Druids, that the major civilizations of this age in which we lived were centered around such monuments. I loved to hear of the intricacies, differences, and similarities. I knew that stones from our islands had been carried hundreds of miles to the south to erect a giant henge for the people there. One stone circle to the south was made of massive stones moved from the western tip of the sea to the center of the island. There were tales that the stones had been moved down river, with salmon and sea otters coming to help, and then across land by tying them to tree rounds that turned in circles, carrying the gigantic stones gracefully over the hills and valleys. I had to remember these questions for Ray the next day, for at dawn, I would head to the stones to begin preparing for the Ceremony of Samhain, the postharvest celebration that ushered in the darkness of winter. Samhain was the midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. It was the time of year when the trees began to shed their leaves and spiders made intricate webs in the bare branches. The dew on the grass was colder, and the earth smelled sweeter, preparing herself to sleep over the winter months. Hearth fires were kept strong all day and the smokehouse worked endlessly to cure our meat and fish for the long winter. I love this time, and I inhaled those musky, fiery scents of fall. It was also a time when the veil between this world and the next was most thin. Our ancestors came down to visit with us on this ceremony, and I felt their presence as I sank deeper into the satisfaction of warm stories and drink on a cold night.

Grandmother must have lit a pipe. The smells of herbs, hides, wine, and soot overwhelmed me as my eyelids became heavy. So I settled into my pillows, pulled a fur up over my shoulders, took one last sip of wine from the full cup Aric had poured for me, and vanished into Ros’s story in a hazy state of mind achieved from the mixture of strong wine, warm fire, spirit tea, pipe smoke, and exhaustion. I felt the grooves in the earthenware cup I held, and as I drifted off, I thought I felt Aric’s fingers entwine mine around the grooves. As I closed my eyes, the story was in bright color before me:

Erland had been a great shepherd and wise man on the isles to the north. He spoke to his sheepdogs in their native language, and birds landed on his shoulder and spoke to him of what the world looked like from the air. One day he got into an argument with a golden eagle about who was bigger, man or the eagle. For when the eagle, the highest-flying of any of the island birds, took flight, he saw the world as smaller than any man had, looking over his prey and the tops of trees and mountains alike as little ants.

“You are no bigger than a rabbit from my perspective, Man,” the eagle said to him. So Erland set out to prove to the golden eagle that man was the dominant animal of the earth and larger than any bird. He told the golden eagle to take flight, and he climbed to the top of the tallest tree in the grove, a giant pine that towered over the rest. Erland sweated and struggled and feared for his life as he reached the highest, thinnest branches of the tree, and at the top, he waved his arms and made himself as big and proud as he could.

When he came back down, the eagle glided down next to him and said, “Man, you were still as small as the mole-rat to me, looking down from the sky on all of my prey. You are small, inconsequential even. You are not as large as you believe, man.”

Erland, knowing more than a bird, refused to believe such nonsense, so he did what any reasonable man might do: he decided he would climb a mountain. The next day and night and the day after that and the night after that, Erland climbed the tallest mountain on the island—the Old Man, the locals called it. When he finally summited, with only his hide bag of water hung around his neck and bits of grasses and herbs to eat on the way up, he waved to the eagle, exhausted and freezing, from the top of the mountain.

The eagle took flight and circled around and around the mountain, over Erland. At one point he seemed almost to touch the sun, and Erland squinted to make out his great form silhouetted against the setting sun, giant wings spread so steady, gliding through the air. It was majestic. Then, a freezing gust of wind knocked the exhausted man over, and there was the eagle, landing gracefully atop Erland’s recumbent form.

“I’m sorry,” the eagle said solemnly, “even still, these mountains look large, but you, the sheep, the grouse, and the owl are all small in comparison.”

Poor Erland was defeated and confused. He looked up at the golden eagle, tears streaming down his muddied face.

I felt Aric settle and let out a loud snore underneath my head, which rested on his chest. I clapped my hand to my mouth in order not to laugh and wake him. Grandmother looked up from the wool stocking she was darning and smiled at me knowingly across the fire.

“Did the men from the northern isles have to catch the tide out to sea and leave you without their story’s end?” I whispered, giggling.

“No, I’m sorry,” Ros replied quickly. “I thought Ailsa’s husband might choke to death, but I’ll go on.”

I widened my eyes at him, trying not to laugh again. Sometimes it was as if he wanted to pick a fight with Aric, a man twice his size. Ros, who barely cleared my own height, seemed to rely on his pugnaciousness and Aric’s relative calmness—or in this case, unconsciousness.

The golden eagle leaned over and wiped Erland’s eyes with his soft, feathery wing. Then he comforted the man under his wing and said, “But look what you have done at your small size! Man can scale mountains like a goat, he can climb trees like a squirrel, and he can command birds of prey like the wind. If you need something big enough to be seen from the heavens in order to assert your power, then you, and you only, can build it, Man. Build something to your majesty and to those who came before you. I will not be able to see you from the sky, but I will be able to see what you have left behind.

“And that’s their story for why their stone circles were built, aye?” Grandmother looked across the fire at me, flames reflected in her yellow-green cat eyes. “Now the storytelling passes to you, my beautiful Druid granddaughter. Tell us today, on this cold eve of Samhain, why the stone circle was built on our own island generations ago.”

I sat up a little, licked my lips, which were dry from wine consumption, and began the story Ray had told me when I became a Druid, a story I had known in my bones as long as I could remember. Everyone was asleep before I finished. Aric must have brought back strong wine, I thought. There wasn’t much time before the Druids would be called at dawn on Samhain to the stone circle, so I covered grandmother with an extra blanket, quenched the fire a bit, and headed off to have a few moments alone at the stones before the others arrived to call the sun.

Chapter 6:

Samhain