Ailsa
I swept the floor of the roundhouse, humming a tune that had been in my head for what seemed like weeks. Grandmother’s figure darkened the door. She came in to add peat to the fire and seemed to be busying herself with anything to avoid eye contact. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she sat on the furs by the hearth. Wordlessly, she beckoned me to join her. I picked up her comb from the table and sat behind her, silently stroking the long silver and black locks, holding the fragile ends between my pointer and middle fingers. To brush someone’s hair is such an intimate act. Grandmother always said it eased the mind, bringing truths to the surface.
I was the first to break the silence, nodding toward the fire that I had stoked. “I’ve covered the fish in clay to bake for dinner tonight and have quite a few oysters to go along with it. I thought I could make some barley cakes too. I’ve been soaking the oats.”
I gathered Grandmother’s hair up, separating it to plait it down from the crown of her head. Before I could begin, grandmother’s hand reached around and grabbed my fleshy white fingers between her sun-browned, strong, knobbed ones. “I know” is what the pressure into my palm said. My heart thumped hard in my chest, and I was sure she could hear it.
I smiled, and then returned my hands to the work of plaiting. I looked over Grandmother’s shoulder into her lap, where she was tracing symbols on her left palm with her right pointer finger, as she often did in contemplative moments. I finished the braid and wound it around the old woman’s head into a spiral shape, which she fastened with the mother-of-pearl combs she had been holding in her pocket. I watched as her stiff hands, fingers swollen at every joint, deftly smoothed her hair and found the exact places where she always fastened her hair with the combs. I had never known her to not wear them, cherish them even, and all of a sudden, I wondered for the first time in my life where she had gotten them. They seemed too exotic to be from this village.
My throat felt thick, and my eyes burned with tears. I seldom cried, but I felt the unusual feeling of fighting tears back that had become too typical these days. I had not kept anything secret from Grandmother since my father passed away, and the need to share the news that Ros not only had finally returned my love but that we had consummated it and made promises to each other bubbled up in me uncontrollably. No one could forgive the betrayal against Aric except Grandmother, not even me. And perhaps that was what I needed the most from her: absolution from someone who loved me unconditionally. Older people always had a way of explaining the emotions of younger people in terms that made them seem fleeting and unimportant. I needed to feel insignificant for a moment after months of being pulled back and forth, between lovers and between my duties as wife and Druid.
As a Druid, I had learned to separate myself from the earthly sways of emotion that normally plagued people my age. I was meant to be aligned with nature and manifest calm in the face of all the problems in the world. In fact, that was also my duty as a Druid, to remain in aligned peace and inspire it in other people, to regulate the nervous system of my people. Here, at Grandmother’s hearth, I sought that which I was meant to give: peace and absolution. Sometimes grandmothers are more magical than Druids.
“I see him torture himself daily with cycles of pain and glee,” Grandmother said as she looked up, tapping the pads of her fingers together simultaneously.
“Who?” I asked, eyes wide.
“Why, the husband of your heart, my child,” she responded as she turned toward me, holding me there by the warming fire. “I know there is only one thing that could bring him so much simultaneous happiness and pain.”
I nodded, gathering my thoughts. “How do you see him so well?” I asked.
Grandmother bent forward toward the hearth, peering into the clay cauldron that boiled the day’s water. Still mostly full, it hadn’t yet reached a rolling boil again after I had let the fire die down through the day’s chores.
“I see him because he is like still water, Ailsa. Like the lake to the south, where the birds gather in winter. He casts a perfect reflection of himself in his stillness for anyone to see who pays enough attention. Yours is the heart none of us can truly see.”
My eyes brimmed with tears, and as the cauldron began to boil over, I felt myself do the same. I kicked a bit of dust into the fire and wiped my tears.
“Oh, my darling Ailsa.” Grandmother took both my hands now. “You can’t run away from unhappiness. It will chase you, as it chased your father, so you have to face it down.” I shook my head at the impossibility, and she touched her forehead to mine. “I did so when I lost your mother and your grandfather. Though I wanted to run many times.”
“Why am I the Druid and not you, Grandmother?”
“Because Jord was my able Druid brother, of course. He deserved it as much as me, but we couldn’t both do it.”
“But you’re so wise, and you’ve become renowned for your healing. Didn’t you want to challenge Jord for the right to your destiny?” I asked.
My grandmother laughed and reached into the fire bare-handed, offering me a bowl of oysters before unwrapping the fish we had baked in the embers. “No,” she answered simply. “Because as much I could see myself as a Druid, I didn’t love that picture of my destiny as much as I loved Jord. He’s my little brother, and I cherish him. I only wish you could have known a love like that.”
“I suppose that Ros’s sisters are the closest thing I’ve had to siblings. But when you have a real little brother or sister, I imagine seeing them radiantly happy is almost like having the feeling yourself.” My mouth began to water from the smell of the fish, and I unwrapped it, saving my favorite, the oysters, for last.
“Well,” Grandmother began, sifting cautiously through her fish as well but searching for words more than bones, “Jord and Ray were born days apart and grew up together. It was known from a very early age, because of some…happenings at the stones, that Ray would become the head Druid. It was meant for him, and he has fulfilled that destiny beautifully.” I narrowed my eyes at grandmother as she hesitantly spoke, waiting for further explanation. “Jord and Ray were perfect complements to each other from a young age, so Jord became second to Ray when Ray became head Druid, and together they have helped to encourage more peace and acceptance in the village. Before you were born, outsiders like your father were looked down upon. But Ray and Jord have a natural ease and acceptance about them. They see how we are alike more than we are different. And of course, adopting Aric when he washed ashore from his ship deepened Ray’s affection for outsiders considerably.”
I thought of my tall, worrisome reed of an uncle and the short stump of utter blissfulness that was Ray. They were quite a pair, and it made me smile to think that they had made a difference in their time leading the Druids. “All I can hope for you is that you have a husband who complements you and your vision for a better world.” She smiled at me from across the fire, her eyes glistening in the light.
I ignored her assumption that I had such a vision and instead narrowed my eyes and tilted my head at her suspiciously. “Did Grandfather give you those hair combs, Grandmother?” I asked.
Grandmother’s mouth was filled with fish. She chewed slowly and responded carefully, “I trust you will figure out who the right man for you is, my dear. But as for me, I absolutely found my happiness with your grandfather and with my herbs.” She gestured above her to the strings of dozens of herbs hanging together in over twenty bunches all over her ceiling. Along the wall were grooved pots and querns full of herbs for grinding, and by the doorway, the only source of natural light, were dozens of tiny clay pots and vials filled with herbal tinctures. She was a true medicine woman.
“Being able to wield my medicines and herbs without the heavy burden of wearing the Druid cloth gave me freedom to travel, heal, and earn renown for my talents. I know you don’t remember, but before you were born, I often sailed to the mainland or went to many of the neighboring islands to help the sick and learn from distant healers, as well as share some of my medicinal tricks and knowledge. In some places there were herbs and flowers I had never seen here, and it was quite an education.” Her eyes grew misty and settled on something far away, beyond the dark room in which we sat.
“Is that where the combs are from?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“A woman’s heart is full of secrets, Ailsa,” she said. “And that is how it should be.”
I nodded and, looking down into my bowl, began to open up the oysters that were peeking out from their shells with the knife I kept tucked in my pocket.
“For a time, I believed I could find something that would help your mother with bearing children.” She waved a dismissive hand in front of her face and clicked her tongue in disapproval. “But that turned out how it was meant to in the end, and there was nothing I could do.” She said this more to reassure herself than me, while reaching out to stroke my cheek with her wrinkled hand, gnarled from decades of precision labor.
“To be a Druid is a great responsibility to your people, Ailsa, but I know that is not lost on you. In the end, I am happy, so is your Uncle Jord, and so you will be, too, when you accept and align your purpose.” She leaned over and kissed my forehead, smelling of salt water from the oysters and smoke from the fire. I clasped the smooth wooden bowl of oysters, looking down at the six I had opened, tucked neatly into their shells.
“Sometimes you hope for pearls but settle for a fat, juicy oyster, right, Grandmother?” I giggled to myself a bit as Grandmother dumped her empty oyster shells into the boiling pot to clean them for their next use. Sometimes she used them to hold tiny amounts of crushed stamen or fish eyes. She smiled the sly smile that crinkled her cat-eyes and showed the round apples of her cheeks. She could look like laughter without making a sound.
“Well, their effects as an aphrodisiac were well tested in my experiments as a young medicine woman,” she said before sipping her tea, and then we both laughed until our sides ached.
Rasha danced barefoot over the pebbles of the river bed and looked more elegant than a waterbird, gliding on the surface. There were places where the great river was deep and strong, where the currents rushed against giant boulders, flowing heavily over falls that could catch young bathers unaware and toss them dangerously. Just as there were powerful swells, there were streams that gave way to small eddies and lees that lapped gently and barely covered your ankles. That’s where I found Rasha, Ros’s sister. It was by mistake, really. I was out at midday picking herbs, when the sun was hottest and thus the oils were most potent on some medicinals, like grandmother had taught me. The nettles and lemon balm often meandered around the riverbeds, and it was true what father had always said, coming from a seafaring people, that all life draws closer to the water. I saw Rasha before she saw me and couldn’t help but feel like a voyeur watching her water-dance in flowing white wool draped over her broad and pointed shoulders. It was not yet Imbolc, and there were still spots where the river was freezing, if not frozen solid. I knew exactly how stinging cold the water felt on her ankles.
Rasha would be seventeen soon, and while she had been dancing in the Druid rituals for four years, this summer solstice would be her first as leader of the dance. It was what she was born to be, clear from her long, lean torso; pointed toes; and long, angular nose and jawbone. Her features were all so pointed, which made her graceful movement even more captivating because of the way it was perfectly punctuated. Ros’s mother was a dancer too and had the same broad, angular shoulders Rasha had.
When they weren’t busy with the day’s chores and farming, they gathered with the other dancers of the village to practice and teach the younger girls the dance of the Druids. Of course, over the years, Ros had snuck up from boat building with his father to watch his mother and sister and had been caught absconding with several different dancers, in various places, including in a boat he was building, and his indiscretion had led to him being banned from dance practice by his mother. I shook my head at the thought of Ros’s past impetuousness, lost in a labyrinth of such thoughts at the moment Rasha called to me.
“Many blessings, Sister Ailsa.” Rasha smiled and seemed to float over to me, out of the shallows of the cool water. Rasha was the only woman in the village taller than me and was thus taller than her older brother as well. She rested her hand on my shoulder, and it felt as light as air, like her bones were hollow as a bird’s. “You look so beautiful today,” she said, her thin lips pressed together in the slightest of smiles. “But what were you just thinking of? You look perplexed.”
“That’s funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you,” I replied, laughing uneasily. “The beautiful part, not the perplexing one.” She waited a moment for me to answer her question, but of course I did not.
“I remember when your father used to call you ‘little dark one,’” Rasha continued. “Such beautiful black hair.” She reached out and pulled a feather, light and fluffy as goose down, from my thick braid. “You are him to the life!” she smiled. “Now, what did you come to the river for?” she asked pointedly, though still smiling.
“I suppose I was hoping to—” I cut myself off and opened the pocket tied round my waist and revealed to her the mass of water herbs I’d been collecting. Rasha’s long, skinny arm dipped into it like a lightning bolt before I could close it up. She rolled the delicate stem of the tansy flower and carrot seeds between her forefinger and thumb. She smelled it, smiled, and handed it back, saying nothing but speaking loudly enough through her piercing blue eyes, which were so much like her brother’s. I cleared my voice and said, “I suppose maybe I wanted to find you,” taking the flower back and dropping it into the pile in my large pocket bag.
“Ahh, how’s wedded bliss, then?” Rasha joked. “I haven’t seen you as much this last year.” She raised her eyebrows.
“I think you probably know it’s not going so well.” My vulnerability jumped out of its hiding place like my herbs, and I looked up, directly into Rasha’s river-blue eyes. It had been over a year since my marriage to Aric, and it would certainly be strange to Rasha that I was carrying the seeds that women, at least those knowledgeable enough in the arts of herbal medicine, would carry to protect themselves from pregnancy.
“Mmhmm,” Rasha almost hummed, “and what else do I know?” She smiled at me, the friend—the surrogate sister—she had known since birth. “I’ll tell you what I know. I know my brother has always left the roundhouse, wandering late at night—since he has been a teenager.” She paused for effect and shook the remaining ice-cold river water from her legs, wiping and warming them with her long blue cloak.
“I know it was often to meet girls in the moonlight. It’s his nature to be cunning in this way, but you know that better than anyone else, I think.” The last comment fell to the pit of my stomach like a stone to the bottom of the river.
“I’m not just another girl to him. We’re in love,” I said.
Rasha bent down to retrieve her dark-blue wool cloak, wrapping it in one graceful swoop around her tall, razor’s edge shoulders. As she secured it at her clavicle with a deft knot, she spoke gently.
“I won’t ever tell your secret, Ailsa. But as someone who will soon be involved in ritual ceremonies as well, I’d advise you to be wary of using your Druid meetings as your cover. Perhaps the gods don’t want to be mixed up in your earthly caper with my brother.” She raised her eyebrows at me, and I stepped toward her to speak quieter. Even the trees listen, sometimes.
“Of everyone in the world, I would think you would be most excited about the prospect of Ros and I finally being happy together, Rasha.”
At this, she turned her sharply angled chin at me. “How could he ever be happy like this, Ailsa? True love can’t be a secret. It can’t come second.”
“I’m learning great lessons about the nature of true love and the intertwining of courage and vulnerability, and it’s not that simple,” I answered.
She sighed miserably. “I pray that my brother does not pay for these lessons of yours,” she said as she began to follow the light out of the deep wood, where she would pass through the lighter woods and eventually into the clearing where our houses lay, having stood next to each other for generations.
“Rasha, come back!” I called after her. “I won’t be blamed for my lies as well as his.”
She turned around, and her voice, now risen above a whisper to reach me, had lost all of its sweetness and become almost shrill, like a broad-winged hawk’s.
“Ailsa, it’s not that I blame you. I just expect more from you than I do from Ros.”
“He lied to me for so long,” I cried out. “For years, I didn’t know his true feelings. Not until I was betrothed to another.”
“I know,” she said simply, walking back toward me with a sympathetic smile. “But I also know more than a few women who, like me, would feel a tremendous amount of sympathy for Aric.” A tiny grin flashed across Rasha’s narrow face, and I could tell she meant well as she continued, “Aric lost his first wife at seventeen, and if he loses his second wife to my ignorant, selfish brother, then he will have no one’s sympathy more than mine.”
We had been so small we barely remembered her, but it had taken him twelve years and many foreign conquests to remarry, this time not for love, I thought, but for honor. I thought about it at night, lying next to him, that maybe that’s what he wanted—to be interlocked with someone who would not love him so he didn’t have to give that part of himself away again. He needed someone who could solidify his place in this village that he had inhabited as on of the only Norseman. With me, he could go on loving his first wife without interruption or insult to his devotion. Maybe all that was true, or maybe it just made me feel justified in my own actions. This is what we do as humans. We justify our worst actions and impulses because we have to in order to press onward and start each new day.
“Iona,” I said with tears in my eyes.
Rasha looked at me, questioning, and sympathetically brushed the hair from my face. Afraid to press further into the delicate territory of my marriage, she changed the subject abruptly, though to something still quite topical. “Ros and I are supposed to meet with twins from the outer islands to negotiate our marriages at the next full moon.”
My heart felt like it was in my throat again. Not necessarily because this information was a surprise but because I was finding out from Rasha instead of Ros. “The snow moon,” I said.
“Yes, Berk and Onda,” Rasha replied. “You may know them from your cousin’s village. It’s a good match, and they’ve agreed to sail here to build homes.”
“Ros didn’t tell me, of course.” I scoffed, blowing loudly out of my nostrils like a bull. My hand moved from a frustrated position on my hip to pinch the bridge of my nose in disgust and finally to that place of calming, the back of the hand placed flat on my forehead. “Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m risking it all for true love, and that ideal is greater than the flawed manifestation of it in the reckless form of your brother.” I moved as if to walk away, before Rasha, in a storm of white and gray skirts, swirled around me, blocking my path like a funnel cloud. “I mean, congratulations.” I smiled, pitifully.
“He’s risking his neck too, Ailsa, and the difference is terrifying to me because, you see, you’re actually afraid of losing yours.” She drew her bony forefinger along her long, long white goose neck slowly in a symbolic representation of beheading. “But Ros has nothing to lose; he’s not afraid of dying for you, so I’m scared of what he might do.”
I squeezed Rasha’s hand. I knew she was right because of what Ros had said at the cliffs. I looked up at the violet sky, where a faded half-moon was beginning to rise.
She pulled me to her in an embrace. “Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.” Rasha was the closest thing I had to a sister growing up, and I knew in my heart she was trying to help, but the concept that Ros’s birth had saved my life, that we had been fed and weaned together and grown up as best friends but were not “meant to be,” just felt wrong in my gut. She pulled away, holding me by the shoulders, looking down into my eyes.
“My prayer is that this experience will teach you to embrace your femininity, Ailsa. The Druids push you toward androgyny because it feels more comfortable to them for you to embody both sexes, but there is power in your womanhood that needs to be wielded. That’s where the power in the dance comes from, and this is the reason that only women can lead it. Our power is sacral, from our wombs, and gives birth to all other power there is.” She gestured toward my middle, as if to illustrate.
“I find it nearly impossible to balance my earthly desires as a woman with the spiritual way in which I’m supposed to conduct myself. I fear I’m spinning out of control.”
“Nonsense!” Rasha said, eyes wide. “You can be a Druid priest, you can live half your time in a spiritual trance, and you can be in love with the worst womanizer on the island, my brother, whom only I could love better than you.” She paused for a small intake of air. “And you can still be the most powerful woman the village has ever known.” She brought her left hand down into a fist and placed it over her lower abdomen. “We contain multitudes. Our impulses are so much more than good or evil. The future is entirely within us.” I nodded. I believed the future was within me, but I couldn’t see clearly what it held.
Rasha reached deep into her own pocket, which was hanging around the cloud-white wool of her dress, underneath her indigo cloak, and produced what appeared to be a small stone. She placed it lightly in my hand, wrapping her impossibly long fingers around mine to signify the moment, the prayer, and the gift.
“It’s a black pearl. It’s rare and beautiful like you.” She smiled and continued, “The oyster makes the pearl when something wrong, something foreign or dangerous, penetrates its shell. The pearl itself is actually a protective coating, but what’s at the core of the outer beauty is the inner disturbance, which made the beautiful thing in the first place.”
A tear dropped from the corner of my eye, into the palm of my hand, sealing the gift exchange in sacred water. “Am I the pearl or the disturbance?” I asked.
“You’re both,” Rasha answered. “If a freshwater oyster can do the hard work to make a pearl out of sand in just a year, what could you do during the wheel of the year, Ailsa?”
In a flurry of skirts and naked feet prancing over slick stones, she was gone.
“Why does everyone seem wiser and more fit to be a Druid than me today?” I laughed out loud and asked the silence of the late-winter wood.
The woods, through which the river ran, were just north of the village. The waters came down from the peaks in the north, cascading in various waterfalls, until they calmed and quieted, broadening through the village on the eastern side. Another river ran into the sea on the western side, but it was brackish and full of fish, surrounded by bogs and tall grasses. This river by the village was powerful and peaceful at once, glittering with hidden gems like my black pearl that peeked through the river rocks underneath. The sounds it made, from the rhythmic tripping of water over rocks to roaring cascades, created a comfortable silence when one entered the woods. It made it easy to drown out conversations like the one Rasha and I had just had. The colors were vivid and calming, cool blue-gray in the shade of the woods with moss-green rocks jutting out in perfect intervals.
I particularly loved this spot of the river that ran just by the oak grove. Here, everything became euphonious, a hushed susurrus of the wind in the leaves of the trees, the noise of the world drowned out by birdsong, chipmunk chatter, and river whispers. I suppose that’s why the festival dancing must have originated here; there was a certain musicality so the dancers could practice without Druid drums. It’s also why I was drawn to this spot for the herbs that day.
“Since when does Rasha have all the answers?” I said out loud but suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Instantly, my mind grappled with embarrassment and moved to defend itself. Had someone heard our conversation? Could it get back to Aric? I was reaching for a response in my mind when I realized the animation of the noise was right in front of me, on the opposite bank of the river, camouflaged by the brown and roan layers of dead leaves blanketing the ground. I held my breath in my chest, watching the heartbreaking wobble of the tiny fawn’s spindly legs, which seemed to vanish up into her giant golden-brown eyes.
“Oh, well you’re a beauty, aren’t ye?” I asked in a soothing voice, automatically reaching out my hand, extending my arm across the river, wading in ankle-deep without lifting my robes, slowly, patiently, desperate to make contact with this most innocent creature. I noticed the white spots standing out from the tan pelt, all her marks of youthfulness.
“You’re born too early, like me, wee one. It’ll be too cold for ye for two moons still.” The fawn continued to stare at me, piercing my heart. It gave only the faintest of head movements to confirm that it studied me too, but she dared not move or walk to reveal her weakness, let alone fall. No, not weakness, I corrected myself. Just newness. Yes, that’s like me too. New to the Druidic Order, new to marriage, new to it all. Yet this spot was a good place to practice prancing, the gentle leaves breaking her falls and cool, clean water to quench her thirst, and I suddenly saw in her the desire to frolic.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked. “She must be working hard to keep you warm since you came before spring.” I found myself reassuring her that there were plenty of mosses and winter herbs around the river this time of year. They would be fine as long as they stood clear of the predators and bedded down for the upcoming snow moon. I suppose that’s why it was important for the little fawn to practice her prancing.
After several minutes, I realized that I was frozen in place, having waded ankle deep into the river, arm extended, eyes fixed on the fawn who was equally frozen. How long had we stood like this, analyzing one another, lost in one another’s dark eyes? I flinched first, huffing as I realized that my ankles and feet were numb from the winter river. Slowly, I stepped back to my side of the riverbank, grasping a rock so I didn’t fall over for lack of feeling in my feet. I removed the fur from my cloak and wrapped my feet, patting them dry and rubbing them for warmth. A quick movement in the periphery of my vision caught my attention, and I looked up to see that the fawn had vanished, replaced now by a giant red stag, dark auburn and furry, red eyed with towering antlers, at the peak of their size and about to be shed so they would grow strong and pointed again by mating season in October.
Startled, I backed up on hands and feet like a crab, resting against a hazel tree and flattening myself to look as harmless as possible. I had expected to see a doe, but the appearance of the sire surprised and frightened me a bit. He stared me down until I felt my heart start to race, and then a motion from behind his right shoulder pulled both our attentions away. The fawn pranced off into the distance, lifting herself perfectly into the air like she might take flight. The sight was dazzling, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the tiny thing’s sudden strength. Together we watched the fawn prancing off through the dark wood, where the hazels and oaks gave way to thicker walls of firs and pines, their evergreen needles still bright, offering shelter in the cold. Then the stag turned back to take one last look at me, to measure up the threat I posed, before he followed his young into the setting sun that shone in shafts of golden light through the thick fir trees in the distance.
I finally let out a deep breath and rose to my feet, which now had feeling restored to them. In fact, my whole body seemed to be buzzing. I wrapped the black fur around the shoulders of my green cloak and buried my cold, pale fingers into it, shivering with the frost and my thoughts. I brought my fingers to my lips, blowing warm air into them and wiggling them around as a thought occurred to me. “Born too early, but she’ll be fine because she has a good sire.” I lost sight of the stag in the woods and turned north toward the oak grove. “I know you are here with me, Father.” I whispered into the swirling wind as it lifted the tail of my cloak and seemed to sweep me off my feet and push me gently toward the oak grove. “Time now for Druid things.” I told him. Nature conspires for us all to end up where we belong, I thought as I rubbed the dark pearl in my pocket.