Ailsa
This is how I found myself in my grandmother’s house on the day after Samhain again, a year since I had cuddled around the fires sharing stories and sinking into bliss together with Aric and Ros. I had told my tale of the stones, why they were built, and what magic lay inside them. The thought of telling stories gave me a pang as I awoke, still wondering about Ros; how he had the courage to cliff jump into the night sea like that was more than I had ever expected from him. I was surrounded by a pile of soft hides, furs, wool blankets, and feather pillows, yet I felt myself suspended in the air as he had been.
Grandmother waddled over to me by the hearth, her softly rounded form slightly hunched. She felt my head with her long, graceful fingers and looked into my face with bright eyes, humming a tune with as much mirth as a new mother. Her hair was nearly all silver and hung straight down her shoulders cascading over her back; she flipped it back and forth as she worked, grinding grain on the quern for bread, deflowering herbs, and drying and cutting up her medicines. She sat on the floor now, legs folded beneath her as she brushed out my hair, equally long but black as night like my father’s and full of knots from the ocean wind.
Grandmother’s brush didn’t go through my hair quite as smoothly as it did her own. “Your hair must be coarser than a boar’s, Ailsa.”
I took the tea and drank, the heat of the liquid assaulting my senses, along with the camphorous smell. “This tea is nectar, Grandmother.”
She smiled and fixed my blankets around me. I gazed into the crackling red-gold embers of my grandmother’s hearth fire. These days we kept the fire going all day long so that we could sleep at night, blissfully warm under a pile of furs, a goat’s stomach filled with warm water at our feet for extra heat. The longest night was approaching, just a little over one moon away now. Ray and the rest of the Druids felt sure the baby would arrive then and that she would be marked to be a Druid like me, my Uncle Jord, my great-grandfather, and my ancestors who built the stone circle.
“You should go back to sleep, darling; you’ve been through much,” Grandmother said, finishing my plait and kissing my forehead. “I’ll tell Aric you’re feeling better. He’s out pacing in the barley field with worry. Thank the gods we cut it last month, or he’d have stomped it all to death.” She laughed, rising slowly, bones cracking, and went out the hide door.
But I couldn’t sleep, wondering where Ros was, if he had let either the sea or his sadness, or both, swallow him. “Love is not some fragile vessel that shatters when the fire is hot.” I ran his words from last night through my mind over and over again. But I never questioned my decision. “This is blood sport,” he had also once told me, talking about love. Ros burned so hot, it was hard not to catch a few of his sparks for yourself. He knew that as much as I loved him, I couldn’t go. He knew before I did.
Aric ducked in under the hide of my grandmother’s house and made it to my bedside in one stride. Grandmother stayed out, surely to give us some privacy. He kissed every inch of my small face. I felt a little like I had been greeted by a loyal hound instead of my husband.
“Hello,” I said weakly.
“Oh Ailsa, Ray said you would be fine, but I couldn’t help but worry while you slept all day.”
“How is he?” I asked.
“A bit sore from carrying ye to me so I could whisk you home, here.” He laughed. “But he’s all right; he’s with the hapiru in his home.”
“The stranger?” I asked.
“Yes, and he’s very strange. I saw them gathering stones this morning.” Aric smiled, looking into my eyes and tucking my hair behind my ear. “But he’s not here to hurt anyone,” he continued. “Ray is currently trying to talk him out of sending one boat full of men south to find Ros who beguiled them and caused them to lose a good sail and rudder, however.”
“I don’t think they’ll catch him,” I said, smiling, finishing my tea and laying my head back to a more comfortable reclining position. “Gathering our stones?” I asked. “Why?”
Aric’s eyes widened and lit up. And I began to think he was acting giddy for more reasons than just my apparent health improvement. “You should have seen it, Ailsa. Last night on the beach, he broke off pieces of the boulders with the white and silver veins—you know, the ones at the cave’s entrance? And he melted them in the fires of Ros’s ship. The fire burned hot enough to melt stone, and he said this melted substance, combined with the blue and green veined stones in the circle, is what their weapons called bronze are made of.” He smiled at this thought. “Those weapons and breastplates, and jewelry, he can teach you to make it all.”
“Me?” I asked.
“Yes, he calls you ‘the dowser.’” I looked away from Aric into the fire. “He’s traveled so far, Ailsa. He speaks of his homeland in the south, where there are great cities and huge buildings, taller than trees, more people than you could imagine.”
He placed his hand on top of mine, which lay on top of the furs. I should have been sweating, but I felt a cold chill run down my spine and a ghostly presence. Was it my father? Still here for Samhain, trying to warn me about these strange visitors.
Aric continued, “He says he needs you to use your dowser ability to help find the stones that contain the magic substance when you are well.”
A snow blanketed the entire island for the first time since I was a girl, and similarly, a sickness had fallen over the village in the last fortnight, both making the days more silent than anyone would wish. Everyone was keeping to themselves, by their hearths, under blankets, but occasionally neighbors would venture out to check on one another, exchange children who weren’t sick so they might play a bit, and take their minds off the slow passage of time as the days became shorter and the winter weather and illness kept us all inside by the fire.
Ray was going around from house to house, checking on the weaker and older patients. Two elderly women, friends of grandmother’s since childhood, had passed away, and one baby and two small children were very ill. I worried to the point of obsession about spreading the illness to my grandmother, but as second Druid to Ray, I felt the need to accompany him on most of his visits and to relieve him of his duties when he had been working around the clock. Grandmother and I also helped however we could from home, boiling extra water, steeping willow bark to make tea for body aches, steeping inhalations of peppermint and eucalyptus leaves to help relieve congestion. The children, adults, and elderly could drink the tea, and I would dip a rag into one of the bowls to saturate the end and then wring it, drip by drip, into the infants’ mouths as grandmother had done for me when I was a mewling sickly babe. It was easy to busy myself around the house when I was there making the medicines, heating stones for those with the chill and heating the inhalations. I held children, swept floors, comforted the grieving, and felt light on my feet until the end of the day. We went on like this for an entire cycle of the moon.
During this time, Elijah, the stranger, or the hapiru, as most called him, had worked tirelessly at the stone circle and around the coastlines, gathering what stones he could and teaching Jord how to increase the heat of the fire. He asked me to help lead him to the stones that contained the metal and taught me how to use and amplify my dowsing abilities. I talked with him about the stones, recounted the stories of my ancestors, and listened as he explained the science of alchemy, but I felt like I was most needed by Ray and the village at this time. Peculiarly, Elijah had no fear of the sickness that had struck the village down. He appeared immune to it, in fact. That was honestly something I had even more interest in than the bronze.
We spent most of our days and evenings in Grandmother’s house. I trusted Aric to keep her safe and warm by the fire, well-fed, and hydrated with marrow bone soup. I made several huge batches of the soup with all the bones from Aric’s hunts, and once the sicker patients could drink, I replaced their sipping tea with pitchers of the healing and nourishing broth. I looked forward to coming home to the two of them at the end of the day. We would all cuddle up by the fire as we sipped soup and discussed the welfare of the sick and the work the Druids were doing to keep the illness at bay for the long winter ahead. Then we would distract ourselves from the sickness, telling stories and singing so the baby could hear our joy for her impending arrival. This was how the last few nights leading up to the longest night of the year were spent, and despite the hardship the village faced, I hadn’t felt so safe and content since I was a girl and I had fallen asleep to the sounds of my father and grandmother talking.
In the morning I would wake at dawn and head to Grandmother’s house to check on her and prepare my needs for the day. The day before the longest night of the year, I woke up early. What am I forgetting? I thought, and grandmother replied promptly, “Take the ground dandelions to mix into the teas as well, huckleberries for those who can manage to eat a few, and perhaps—” Instead of finishing her sentence, she started to push herself up from her low seat by the hearth. “If you look in my smallest reed basket, you’ll find a clay vessel full of mistletoe.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. Mistletoe was a potent herb, and only the Druids were supposed to use it, but Grandmother was a renowned healer, and I trusted her.
“Just one little needle ground into the tea of the old ones, darling. It will help. And let Aric help you carry everything, please. I’ll stay put, I promise.”
Obediently, Aric pulled his cloak over his shoulders and began to lace his over-the-knee snow boots by the door. I had organized everything onto wooden pallets that were easy to stack and carry or pull with leather straps across the fresh-fallen snow. Aric followed me outside dutifully, showing the most subtle of smiles as a hint of his amusement at being my apprentice. “Maybe we should get you a dog for this,” Aric jested as I passed him with long strides, kicking my cloak and skirts up in a flurry of snow as I walked with intention toward the houses that needed care.
“I had a dog.” Falcon was really my father’s dog, and he had left me not too many years after my father had, gone to die by himself in the woods. His body had been torn apart by vultures and foxes before Ros and I could find him. “He was in quite the state when I found his body, but I made him a funerary pyre at the cliffs after we found him in the oak grove near that moss-covered fallen log that crosses the river under the canopy,” I explained, remembering that awful day, silently replaying it in my head.
“He’s a dog, Ailsa,” Ros had said, balking under the fifty-pound weight of Falcon and trying to keep up with me as I walked toward the cliffs.
“He’s a coward,” I had choked out between sobs. And Ros had been stunned into silence, having never heard me cry before. “He didn’t have to die like that. I could have been with him. Coward.”
The rest of the walk to the cliffs had been silent. Rain pelted us, mingling with tears on our faces. Ros, then a boy of fourteen, rarely given over to emotion anymore, felt his throat thicken at the black, silky touch of Falcon’s ear as it flopped against his left hand. Ros had stayed with me through the night, watching me stand, without fear or exhaustion, as the six-foot pyre burned all the way to embers. He knew it was not Falcon that I called a coward—it was my father, not his dog that I was unable to forgive in my heart, for who could not forgive a creature with love as steadfast as a dog’s?
Aric paused at the door to the house we were visiting to tuck the loose hair behind my ear. “I’m sorry you weren’t with your dog, Ailsa. I’m sure you wanted to hold him by your hearth and kiss him as he departed the world.” He kissed my forehead.
“He was partly tame but still a bit wild. He needed to die alone in the woods like an old, sick wolf would, and I couldn’t begrudge him that.” I rubbed the small of my back, which had begun to ache as the day’s labor wore on.
Aric chuckled through his nose as we entered the house. “No, I don’t suppose you could begrudge him. He sounds just like you.”
“You’re not a bad apprentice,” I told him later as we walked on to the next home, where two sick, elderly women lived together. He laughed and massaged the top of my head with his hand, broad fingers spread across my skull within the hood of my new indigo cloak. I hoped my old green Druid cloak was keeping Ros warm on these long, frigid nights, but knowing him, he had someone else keeping him warm.
“Where do you think Ray ran off to, anyway?” Aric asked, returning me from my thoughts.
“He had to go prepare for the winter solstice with the other Druids,” I answered as I kneaded the back of my hips with my knuckles. Aric saw the furrow of my brow and put his larger, stronger hands to my back, where he pushed harder. It felt good, but the pain would not abate. I looked into his face and saw the worry. I must have looked worse than I thought. “Let’s get back to Grandmother’s house quickly,” I said, my clammy hands grasping for his.
He picked me up swiftly, a swirl of cloaks, and ran for home, calling for someone to fetch Ray.
“Red hair.” It was the first thing I heard after I awakened. Ray was there, holding my daughter over me. As he lowered her, a halo of light appeared to follow in her wake, and when she touched my chest and felt my heartbeat, her crying ceased. After Ray’s face and my daughter’s face came into focus, the next face I saw was my husband’s.
“Like my mother’s hair,” Aric said, smiling down at me. It was a simple, innocent remark. But what it held was an understanding, a union, that we maybe didn’t know we had until that moment.
I saw him swallow. It was audible, and I knew the hours that had passed had not been easy on him. Somehow Ray had saved me, holding my life in his small, glowing, strong palm, yet he had not been able to save Aric’s first wife Iona. The baby had been born breathing, but my own breath had stopped and then come back again, just like Aric’s had that day by the sea. I didn’t understand but knew it was part of a design I was never meant to understand.
“Did you have a name in mind?” Grandmother asked.
“Did you, Mamai?” Aric asked, using the simple, sentimental word for mother, and it took my breath away, so shocked and touched I was to consider myself in the leagues of this precious word I had used for my own mamai, a word which I hadn’t uttered aloud in so long.
“I do have a name in mind,” I replied, and my voice felt shaky and not my own as I spoke it out loud. Ray smiled and ducked out silently.
The furs and hides were piled high in the main room, where the sunlight spilled in through the doorway and windows. We were close to the hearth, and the warmth of Aric’s body and the furs he had brought for the baby kept us warm. He sat, naked, legs spread in the bed, with me squished between his thighs and the baby alternately suckling and asleep at my breast.
“Two years married tonight,” he whispered into my ear, leaving a wet kiss on my cheek.
“This is happier than I thought I could ever be two years ago,” I said quietly into the sweet smell of my baby’s russet and ginger head. “I hope I make you both proud of me,” I whispered.
“I think she’s smiling,” Aric said. I took the pearl that Rasha had given me, which had been concealed in the leather purse full of herbs and seeds that now lay next to our bed. I waved it back and forth in front of her big blue eyes, which looked too big for her head. She cooed, her gaze reaching upward toward the stone, her eyes crossing to focus on it.
“A beautiful black pearl,” Aric commented, stopping my hand to observe the iridescent colors—green, blue, violet, indigo, gray, midnight, and pitch black—as they undulated across the dark surface between my fingertips. “You’re lucky to find one of such beauty. I’ve seen strings of them, but no single pearl so beautiful as that.”
I smiled. “Rasha gave it to me one morning at the river when I caught her practicing her ritual dance. I thought I had lost it, but I think I understand better now what it means to do the rough work to make a pearl.”
Aric laughed. “Shall we sing to her?” he asked in his tender and deep voice.
“Yes, I know just what to sing,” I replied.
Some days later, my grandmother, her brother Jord, and Ray were gathered around the hearth on the other side of our house from where I was reclining with the baby. They had brought gifts of herbs for us. Lavender and calendula from Ray’s garden for my aches, wild chamomile picked by Grandmother for my rest, and lanolin from the sheep’s wool for cracked, sore nipples from breastfeeding, harvested from Uncle Jord’s sheep. They smiled into their earthenware tea bowls, then grinned over at us with pride.
At the moment I saw her, I knew we had been souls intertwined for eons. There she was, smiling up at me, smelling as fresh and new as a ewe in spring, but she was eerily familiar. “Where have we met before?” I asked her as I kissed her light blue fingertips. She nestled into me, and I kissed the soft orange fuzz on her head. It had an earthy smell, mingled with my own musk and the new and special scent that was just hers. “I thought she would be a stranger when we met, but she’s not, is she?” I asked.
Grandmother went to her work kneading my belly to make sure everything had come out over the last few days. “Och, no, lovely. She’s been here all along, just waitin’ for you to be ready. Watching you as ye climbed your trees, as you lost your parents and found your Druidism.” She searched deep within my womb to be sure everything was out, found something she didn’t quite like and distastefully discarded it, then settled herself to a bit of a push and pull of realigning my hip bones.
“And now she’s here in my arms, and the moon is new, and so is life,” I said.
“It’s actually quite old, what you’re doing, love, but I get your meaning. It’s new for you.” Grandmother kissed my forehead, and, exhausted, I fell asleep to the sound of her humming and rocking our little light-bringer, Sorcha. There were also the deeper sounds of my uncle Jord, my husband Aric, and his adoptive father Ray laughing and talking across the room. My family was whole for the first time since my own birth, and I could rest now, but not for long. Just ten days after the solstice, after Sorcha’s foretold birth, Ray disappeared.