Ailsa
The oak grove was just barely touched by frost. The spring equinox was that night—and the full worm moon would soon appear. I loved seeing all the happy earthworms devouring the spring plants and turning, belly up, into the sun in resplendent glory. It was an early sign of better weather. Recently winter had become long, and we needed such a promise. I picked one up, wriggling, and dropped it in my pocket to later bless the soil in our kale yard and barley patch.
I rubbed my eyes because it was early, and everything seemed unclear. The fog was only just lifting over the land and my mind. The trees were budding; everything was an endless new green color—that quiet, perfect moss green before it brightens and darkens, descending in dark green shadows upon the landscape.
I had risen well before the dawn to have time in the oak grove before the other Druids arrived—and hopefully some time alone to talk with Ray. My own weight felt heavy, and I leaned against the trunk of a tree for support, looking down at my bare feet. No sooner had I closed my eyes and rested my head than Jord appeared in his green cloak in front of me. He did not ever walk; he glided, his eyes crescent moons of pleasure and his chin long and angular like the rest of him. I straightened up and squared up to his glare. “I knew you’d be first,” I said.
“But it is actually you who is first.” He smiled down at me from his great height, and his gray features shimmered in the dawn light that trickled through the young, blossoming trees.
“I’m so tired, Jord.” He nodded, coming closer to hear me. “I can’t remember a time anymore when I didn’t feel this great pull in all directions: the pull of the earth, of the Druids, of my family life.”
“Yes,” he agreed, his creased eyes focusing on something in the distance. “Your life has been a time of peace for our village, but much is changing. You feel the shifts before most.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. This wasn’t exactly what I needed to hear.
“I’m supposed to be the centered one, Uncle, the sage, but lately it seems like I’m just siphoning wisdom from those around me because I can’t steady myself.” I looked up at him, distressed. “I don’t sound like much of a leader.”
“Well, surely that’s a part of growing wise, gathering from other places and choosing what you hold on to and what you let go of,” he answered with a questioning head tilt.
“I just want to help people and be respected like Ray is. I want my destiny to feel undeniably right like it did in those days on Orkney.”
“It’s easy to feel strongly when you’re 15, before you’ve worked out the complexities of everything. Is certainty even what you’re truly looking for? Do you think you will find it where you’re looking?” He spoke with a gentle smile and narrowed eyes.
Silence fell as the other Druids, like a tide, descended upon the oak grove in their dyed-green wool garments, hands upraised. Their bodies matched, and thus their uncloaked heads were the only distinguishing feature. Most of those heads were shades of dark to light gray, some were white, but mine was the only head black as a raven’s.
Jord circled the other nine Druids, touching each head in a blessing, and I remembered the earthworm in my pocket. “This first morning of spring, we summon the ancestors and the earth with an origin story for our meditation. Gather hands now, and Ailsa will lead us in Ray’s place this morning, since Ray has been called to a difficult birth.”
I wasn’t sure I felt like leading the circle this morning, but Jord was clearly trying to make a point in inviting me to lead what should have been his ceremony. No sense in overthinking it. I loved this part; it was a time to truly escape my thoughts by entering chant and oneness through meditation with the other Druids. I shifted my feet in the spring-green grass in order to reach for the hands around me. My toes dug into the loamy forest soil beneath my feet, and I wriggled my toes like worms, seeking deeper comfort and coolness from the friendly earth. Give me strength, I asked the earth silently.
I felt a worm friend wriggle between my toes, and I giggled out loud. Jord, whose eyes had been closed tightly, peaked out of one at me and made a funny face. I think his look was supposed to quiet me, but it actually made me laugh even harder. Soon, as a connected force, my laughter had intoxicated everyone, and each of the eight other ancient Druids around the circle was giggling along with me. This is the way to bring in spring, I thought to myself. And then aloud I said, “The emergence of spring is the laughter of the earth: the frolicking lambs and kids, the boisterous flight of newborn bluebirds, the scratch of squirrels and chipmunk feet on tree trunks, the giggling trickle of the defrosted brook, and the bright flowers in the lee are proof that the earth laughs too.”
“Blessed be,” everyone said in response, and I breathed a sigh of relief as Jord squeezed my hand in the tender way uncles do.
I took a deep breath, centered myself once more, and began. “Now we go back, back to the earth before the long winter was done. Our world is covered in snow; the rivers are impenetrable with ice.” My voice was full of melody and a cadence halfway between singing and chanting. I felt Jord’s long fingers wrap around mine, and on the other side, the clammy hand of Milor, the oldest Druid, grasped mine tightly. The birdsong that had once echoed my words was now drowned out by the humming of my fellow Druids.
“There was a time, not so long ago when we consider the age of the world, when our land was too cold to farm, and man and woman roamed free in the south, with no roots, no village, no stone circle for worship. We were simply another animal in the forest, gathering food for winter, hunting anything smaller or slower. No man dared venture into the frigid North, but as the ice receded, a force began pulling men to the North, stronger even than the promise of fertile lands for planting. You see, the first men who came here were not yet planters, but they felt pulled from their ancient seats, nonetheless.
“And when they met the ice as it receded, then what did they find? An empty land, unpopulated, with no enemies or competition for resources, ripe for planting. But this was a strange new land, and they missed their home. They tried to build a bridge over the ice bridge they had crossed so that when everything finally melted, they could go back to what was known, what was safe. As they felled logs and made a great truss for this bridge, the natural ice bridge melted away, and their hope was lost. They began to use all the timber for boats, but as they built these boats to be able to go home, the ice slowly revealed the richest and greenest rivers, filled with hundreds of fish.”
The humming and chanting of the other Druids grew louder and louder. It was like being in the center of a beehive, and all my senses were awakened from numbness and fog.
“A strange magic happened, and as the snow began to melt on the mountaintops and the ocean was warm enough to swim and fish in, the forest grew, and so did its bounty. The seeds it provided were folded into the land and sprung up, higher and higher, year by year. The very intuition that had pulled the people north told them to cast away their bridges and boats—this was their home!”
The beat of the bodhran grew loud against the sounds of humming, and the Druids fell into a deep meditation. I continued; the words sprang up from the ground into my heart as the story unfolded. “Just as the earth pulled us to this land, so it pulled the stones to their place on the moor. And the stones they carried would be seen as a new kind of structure to demarcate a new kind of world, one in which we belong to the land and it belongs to us. We sing the songs of the fathers and sons who carved and erected the stones. And we sing to their mothers and daughters who cultivated the land, giving us barley, kale, and fruit trees. Their ashes are sprinkled on the sacred ground to symbolize its abundance and purity. It is not the stone monument that is sacred to us; it is the ground that it marks, where we were called and where life was sacrificed to bring forth more life. Don’t forget this important detail when we gather for each festival at the stones. These stones were consecrated by their blood.”
“Blessed be!” they answered me in turns.
Normally we’d end there, but I had a new idea I wanted to try out, so I squeezed Jord’s hand and sent a pulse through the group and added a new blessing. “Just as we had been called and chased the ice away and made space to plant and build, other people felt the call north, slow as ice at first and then quick as a fox. They did not wreck and plunder. They intermarried and became one with our own culture, sewing their history, their ancestors, and their own ways into ours. They erected stone circles like ours in their own sacred places, and so monuments sprang up like young trees on the landscape, and we became brothers, sharing festivals and feasts. At our stones we will forever mark the solstices and equinoxes—and with our brethren, we will travel to celebrate the cross-quarter days.”
As I called out these names, they were repeated in unison: “Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain.”
At this I was somewhat pulled out of my trance, my eyes popped open, and my heart simultaneously ripped open to the face of my father, tall and dark, with black hair, big white teeth, and a smile like a wolf’s.
It was my mother’s family who had given me direct lineage to Druid life, but it was my father, from a northern isle, who had colored my world green and blue and led me into forests and glens when I was a child and did so now in my dreams, even still. How does someone smile through it all and then throw himself off a cliff? Did he think I was better off without him? Did he actually eschew the responsibility of raising a Druid on his own? Suddenly, after all these years, I ached to know what had consumed him so. What if he had acted on impulse and instantly regretted it? Midair even, before the shock of impact killed him? What if the primordial scream I heard in my sleep had been him calling out. “I’m sorry, Ailsa,” it seemed to say.
Then Ray was in my mind, clear as day, though I could still only feel Jord and Milor beside me. “Magical as your mother’s family is, as much as you are the echo of the bone of your Druid ancestors, you are your father’s child, Ailsa. He wanted to protect you from his magic. He came to me, afraid the village would think your Druid abilities were not from nature if they were trained by him—he was a dowser. What you possess are gifts from both your parents.”
And then the cadence of the Druids’ chant brought me back to the story I was telling with my lips, even though my mind had been engaged with Ray. I could barely speak, but I managed to finish my meditation with the Druids. “And so now the earth pulls us back to one another, and we are called to the westerly isles, to the North, and to the mainland, to the magic of other ancestors, my husband’s ancestors, and their…their…cir-circles.”
“Ailsa, are you OK?” Milor whispered in my right ear. That’s the last thing I remember before my mind went white.
“I dream of my daughters’ daughters and the sons they will have, the roles they will play in the spiral of the universe.” I traced the carved spiral on the largest stone in the stone circle with my lily white fingertip in my mind.
“Ailsa, are you OK?” Ray asked, looking down at me, patting my cheek.
“I was just going to ask you the same thing,” I said, looking up into his wrinkled, happy face for the first time in a while—I was a head taller than him, after all, and usually looking down.
We talked for a bit in silence, using our telepathic gifts, until Ray prodded Jord to leave the oak grove with the other Druids so we could speak freely. He knew I was upset. I sat up and picked the small brown leaves from the ground out of my hair while he shooed everyone away and walked back over to me, squatting so we were face-to-face.
“You put me in green robes and called me one of you,” I said without looking at Ray or giving him any of the deference he deserved as my superior. Ray didn’t stand on ceremony, though. Not with me. “I want to cut this part of me out, like a festering wound. This matrilineal Druid nonsense is not me, Ray! I’m the least-fit person!” I yelled, hands reaching up to the sky in frustration, supplication, or both.
I cut my eyes at Ray when I heard him exhale, expecting, perhaps even wanting, an equal reaction, but he just tilted his head slightly, and the wind blew the fringe on his forehead up. “Well, on this matter, your opinion is not the final one, I’m afraid, my dear.”
Rage welled up in me now, and I flailed my arms, unnerving the squirrels and chipmunks and other forest creatures who had been peacefully gorging themselves on the new spring grass nearby.
“You appeared to me and told me I’m a dowser like my father—what does that even mean? I’m so confused. How can I be both a dowser and Druid?”
Ray extended his hand to me. “If you’re feeling better, let’s walk up to the stone circle, shall we?” I reluctantly accepted his help to stand. I knew walking would help clear my head. “A dowser is just someone who feels the magnetic energy of the earth. Sometimes it’s useful—you find important things easily, like water or gemstones and other treasures of the earth.” Ray’s eyes sparkled with some secret he was telling me. “It can also be very painful; the intensity of the feeling can be…overwhelming, like it was for your father.” I stared ahead as we walked out of the woods and across the moor to the stone circle, our hair dancing wildly in the wind. All the feelings my father must have felt at the cliff’s edge bubbled up in me. “Using your dowsing abilities can help you harness the energy so it doesn’t feel as overwhelming as it did for your father. I’ve received a message that it’s time for you to use these abilities with the stones.”
I felt the world spin with this new information. “So not all Druids feel the energy I feel from the earth.”
“No, Ailsa, you’re special, because your father—”
Suddenly, I was furious. “Wait, you’re helping me, so why didn’t you help him?”
“He wasn’t a Druid, Ailsa, and he didn’t want help. He didn’t need help. He knew more about it than me. In fact, I wish he were here to help you with it. I just received the information today that your dowsing would lead us to new magic in the stones.”
“Why didn’t he help me?” I wondered aloud.
“Aric is from a patrilineal society. So is your father. Things pass from father to son in such places. It didn’t occur to your father that you could be anything but a Druid, your mother’s line, in our matrilineal society, but you are both dowser and Druid, and it’s happened for a reason. I’ve been told.”
“Who told you this?” I moaned, putting my hands to my forehead and willing my brain to accept the news.
Ray offered a canteen of water and a stick of goat jerky that I grudgingly took, realizing how hungry I was.
“There are patrilineal civilizations to the south. They have pulled a substance from their stones, and a messenger has come to share it with me. I’ve been told telepathically, but he will arrive with proof within the wheel of this year, Ailsa. In the future, matrilineal cultures such as ours will become fewer and fewer. They assimilate into the patrilineal because of the nature of the masculine possessing the feminine. These cultures are forceful and can be mean and brutish, so the gentle, mothering, compassionate nature of the matrilineal society gives way to them.”
We walked slower now as we crested the hill and the stones appeared in the distance. I digested the conversation and the goat jerky with more ease as we kept walking. One should always go for a walk after tough meals or conversations.
“Then why would we want to possess the magic in the stones, if it leads to such a cultural shift?” I asked, innocently, desperate to preserve the peace I knew.
“We are living in the time of the mother-centric world, Ailsa, and it will be over one day, sooner than you think. This magic in the stones, it can create weapons and structures and tools that we will have to have to continue to exist.” I chewed on my jerky, calmer now. Food had a way of making bad news more bearable. “We will have to change in order to survive. Women will lose power in this new world, and it’s important that you establish your great power, make it known to the world, and have children who can pass on your wisdom and gifts.”
I touched the great stone at the front of the circle, full of sprawled carvings. I’m not sure what I expected, but nothing happened. I pressed my forehead to it, begging for an answer. “What if our children are like Aric?” I asked. “What if they want to conquer and raid, or explore and sail away?”
Ray walked over to the stone I leaned against. “They won’t be, Ailsa. When Aric came to live with us, he gave all that up. He vowed at your wedding that the children would carry your family name, as your father did for your mother. They have bowed to the matrilineal society, and they will be some of the last men to do so on these islands.”
His words brought me back to the crushing thoughts of my father. I had always believed he felt alone because he missed his homeland, but it was even more lonely for him than I had realized. “I wish I could talk to my father about these feelings, the pulls of the dowser, the magnitude of it.” I ran my hand over the blue-green veins of the stone. They looked so much like my own veins that I thought the stone might come to life. Tell me what you are, I willed it, silently, but Ray’s voice broke my concentration.
“You can, my dear! Nothing is lost forever,” he responded, squeezing my shoulder. “Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke, your words travel up to the heavens in a different form.” I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer to my father for strength and understanding. “Everything you do brings honor to him. He sees you from the beyond, even now,” Ray said as I finished my prayer. I opened one eye at a time and saw him staring back at me. “It is the dichotomy in you that must give birth to the future of this land, Ailsa. You’re destined to be head Druid because of who you are, both your mother’s half and your father’s. Who says we have to be just one thing, anyway? Every part of you is true, and there is no point in denying it, or else you deny the possibility of the future. Welcome in every part of you,” Ray finished, furrowing his brow at me knowingly.
If every part of me is true, if there is no part to be denied or cut out, then why can’t I love them both? I thought. Ray turned to leave, brushing off his long green cloak, which dragged the ground behind him. “You just have to balance it with honor,” he said, reading my mind again.
“I know. You’re right. They will kill each other eventually if I continue it this way.”
Ray looked down at the ground in front of him, lost for words. Then he looked up at me and asked. He had to. Aric had been like a son to him. “You’ve seen a vision, then?”
I paused and thought for a moment before responding, “No, truly, I haven’t; I would tell you. But I feel it in my gut. Maybe it’s a dowser’s knowing and not a Druid’s vision if I parse it out.” I laughed, but not my real laugh, an awkward laugh at the ridiculousness of the truth. “One of them will die if this continues, Ray. I have to end it.”
Ray shook his head as if to clarify his confusion by physical force. “But Ros knows you share your bed with your husband. So you truly think Aric would kill Ros if the nature of your relationship became known to him?” he asked. “I don’t believe him capable of that.”
“No, there’s something else,” I responded, leaning on a nearby stone for support. “Ros doesn’t know that I am coming to love Aric as well. In fact, I don’t think I realized that until now either. I honestly think that knowledge would kill Ros or would make him kill…someone else.”
Something urgent rose up in me as I spoke these words out loud. Ray noticed. “Go home to your husband, child. I will explore this vision of Ros in violence in my meditations.”
“I thought he was still gone trading. How do you know he’s home?” I squinted at him, wondering just how much he used his psychic powers to check in on Aric.
Ray laughed. “I may see the future sometimes, but in this case, I was coming from your home when I found you had fainted. I was speaking with Aric, who had just returned, when I had a feeling you needed me in the oak grove,” he said softly.
I smiled at the mundane explanation, which was just what I needed in this moment in which I had become overwhelmed by the earth’s magic. “Let me walk with you to make sure you get home safely?” Ray asked with a hopeful brow, knowing well that my tendency was to refuse help. “Yes, of course.” I answered, mystified by Ray’s goodness and his uncanny ability to appear wherever he was needed. “Just give me a moment to myself?” I asked. He nodded.
Before returning home, I walked to the edge of the cliffs behind the stone circle. I carried the wild carrot seeds in the pocket tied around my waist still, along with other medicinals and practical items: a comb, mint leaves and lemon balm, a flint knife wrapped in leather, an opalescent feather Father gave me the day before he died, a small wooden spoon for shared meals, and the tiny black pearl recently acquired from Ros’s sister. I reached in and felt each tiny preciousness in between my fingertips. “Time to fly on the wind and make wild carrots,” I said as I pulled out my seed pouch and tossed it over the edge.
And with that, I turned on my heel and ran as fast as my feet would carry me toward the roundhouse I shared with Aric, forgetting Ray waiting for me at the wood’s edge. Now that I had trusted Ray with everything and he had told me the truth about my dowsing power, I felt free. Barefoot in my flight, I skipped and frolicked down the hills toward the valley of the mountains to the north, where the village dwellings were, my heart suddenly having grown wings.