I was right. The Morrigan and her Ladies couldn’t teach me much. My father had given me a bard’s education and a deep understanding of the natural world around me. We had performed rituals together at every appropriate occasion. He had taught how to find magic within myself and the world around me.
The Ladies gave me freedom, though, freedom to explore magic and ritual far beyond the limits my father imposed upon me. They gave me an introduction to the womanly arts of spinning, weaving, and sewing.
I never mastered those arts but knew enough to make simple garments and stitch a fine seam in the gaping wound in the hermit’s thigh when he slashed it open while chopping wood. Rain had made the ax handle slick, and the old man didn’t really have the strength to wield his tool properly. After that, I chopped wood for him as I did for the Ladies.
As I chanted healing and cleansing spells over the ugly gash, the wind whispering through the trees told me that Curyll had suffered a wound as well. I almost abandoned my task to go to him. ’Twas my destiny to heal him, to protect him. How could I do that from the isolation of Avalon?
A faery giggled in my ear and gave me further news. My father stitched the knife slash across Curyll’s ribs and bound the wound tightly. He wrapped the bandages about Curyll’s chest tight enough that my friend could barely breathe. He certainly couldn’t swing a weapon prematurely and reopen the wound. The faeries assured me his hurt was minor. He didn’t need me. Yet.
First I must learn the great healing magic. Only The Morrigan could teach me that.
I calmed my heartbeat and waited.
The Ladies did teach me an awareness and appreciation of my maturing body. I learned to welcome the flow of moon blood as a symbol of my femininity and potential fertility.
I didn’t expect to participate in Beltane that first year. My womanhood was too new. I stayed in my small round hut alone while the Ladies rowed over to the lake village. In the morning they greeted me as usual, if a little red-eyed from lack of sleep, and nothing more was said of the rituals that had transpired.
The faeries carried more interesting accounts of Beltane. Interspersed with many giggles and a few miniature demonstrations, I learned some of the rituals and excesses of this fertility celebration. My face burned with embarrassment. The secret places on my body heated with longing.
Mostly The Morrigan and her Ladies taught me to be at peace with myself whether alone or in company. I sat for hours contemplating nothing, while I opened myself to the will of the gods.
The Morrigan welcomed people from villages near and far with grace and dignity. She always wore yellow, the same color as her hair. She appeared a ray of sunshine to those in need. We treated their ailments, accepted their offerings, and heard the latest gossip from the outside world.
More and more the chores of healing fell to me, directed by The Morrigan with elegant gestures and gentle words. Of the six Ladies who taught me, four had lived on the Isle of Avalon for fifty years and more. Their eyesight failed, and their hands trembled. So I sewed up wounds, mixed tonics, and applied poultices. For the truly serious ailments, The Morrigan performed great healing rituals. She took me into her hut along with one other, an ancient Lady who could barely see but had a gentle touch with minor magic.
Then I forgot everything that transpired. The Morrigan must have enchanted me. When I awoke from the trance, I ground my teeth and sought information.
The Morrigan’s hut was almost empty of furniture and adornment. Any tools she might have used during her ritual had been cleared away before I opened my eyes and my mind.
I found The Morrigan collapsed upon the dirt floor, her patient resting comfortably on her cot.
“What ails you, Lady?” I knelt beside her, feeling for her pulse. I couldn’t find the life beat on the inside of her wrist. When I found the great vein in her neck, the shallow and uneven rhythm frightened me.
“A headache only,” she whispered. Her voice sounded scratchy and strained.
“She will need sleep,” the ancient assistant said. She stumbled up the one step to crawl out the doorway.
I lit a small oil lamp so I could see better.
The Morrigan screamed as the light hit her eyes.
Quickly I doused the lamp and ran to my own hut for my stash of herbs. I prepared a soothing mixture of cleansing herbs to throw on the fire and fed her small sips of an infusion of willow bark until she slept.
Three times that first summer on Avalon I nursed her through the aftermath of a healing spell. “Teach me this magic,” I begged her when she recovered the third time. “You are killing yourself by giving too much to others. Please share this burden.”
“You will not thank me, Wren. This is something I must do. I am The Morrigan.” Her face had lost most of its natural color, and her hair hung limply about her shoulders, pale and lifeless. I knew from experience that a week or more would pass before she regained vitality. Each time she worked a healing, less of her strength returned and she lost weight that she never regained.
“I will be The Morrigan after you. There is no one else to take your place. Please do not do this to yourself anymore. Teach me.” Tears sprang to my eyes, and I realized I had come to love this woman. I had come to love Avalon and the Ladies.
I still missed Da and Curyll and the others, but this place had become home, an anchor in my life; something I had never had before.
The Morrigan met my demand for learning with silence.
Then the day came the next winter when two of our Ladies burned with fever and coughed incessantly. I burned special herbs on their hearths. I fed them special tonics and potions. I prayed.
Still the illness persisted, and the women grew weaker by the hour.
I called The Morrigan. She examined each Lady minutely, listening to their breathing through a long tube of seaweed. She felt their pulses at neck and wrist and studied the phlegm they coughed up.
“I can do nothing more for them,” she said quietly and left the smoky hut.
“Then teach me how to help them,” I demanded, following her to the door of her own shelter.
“I have no more strength, Wren. I have not had that kind of strength since before you came to us. Even the teaching would leave me vulnerable to the sickness that takes our sisters. I would willingly sacrifice myself to show you the secrets. But you are not ready to take my place. When I have passed from this life, Avalon will cease to be. Without Avalon, you cannot do this magic.”
“What do you mean? Avalon is merely a place.”
“Avalon is a special place. You have experienced the peace and stillness within that follows a ritual at the red spring.”
“But Avalon does not work magic. People do. I can do it.”
“Not alone.”
I raised one eyebrow in question. She looked at me strangely and sighed.
“The great healing magic belongs to women. It must be worked in community. A maiden, a matron, and a crone must work in concert. When I am gone there will be only you and several crones. No more maidens come to us. Why should I kill myself teaching you this magic when you will never be able to use it?”
The world reeled around me. Pieces of a vision flitted before my eyes. Laughter bubbled in my throat.
“I will need it. To save Britain, I will have to heal the Ardh Rhi,” I said through numb lips.
“Then you must wait for your father to show you the pieces of the great magic of healing. I cannot.” She ducked into her hut without another word.
I dared not follow her. Privacy within our huts must be respected as absolute.
Both of the ailing Ladies left this life in the dark hours just before a rain-soaked dawn. I could not greet the sunrise with joyful song that day. I spent the morning ritual time composing and singing a ballad that celebrated the life of these two gentle women. As I sang, I prepared the winding cloths for their shrouds. Tomorrow at dawn we would commit the bodies to the funeral pyre.
And then only five of us would be left to carry on the legacy of the Ladies of Avalon. As much as I wanted to run to my father and demand the knowledge that would help me heal people, I knew the time was not yet right for me to leave. The pattern of my life was still fragmented.
o0o
Three years later, I listened to the wind whispering through the apple trees in early spring. Each rustle of a leaf or creak of bough brought news to me in the slow, simple language of the forest. A language that formed an integral part of the pattern of life.
The scent of apple blossoms lay heavy on Avalon. Bees hummed drowsily in the sunshine. The news brought to me on the breeze flowed slowly through my senses. Nothing to excite the trees or the people they spoke of.
No news of Curyll came to me today. Four years of war against the Saxons had earned him a few scars and many friends. My heart ached more each day I could not share with him.
My training was almost complete. I knew the rituals a priestess must perform. I knew how to conserve my strength to work magic properly and to use my talent sparingly. And I knew when I needed true magic, or if a trick would complete the task. But I had never been allowed to work the great magic of healing — the one bit of knowledge I needed most.
Listening to trees and faeries and animals was neither a trick nor magic, merely a natural part of me that could not be denied.
When the wind and trees finished discussing the latest battle, a minor victory for Ardh Rhi Uther Pendragon over the Saxons, I trudged toward The Morrigan. She had summoned me some time earlier. I was late.
A heaviness in my limbs told me of change in my orderly life. I wasn’t ready for it. I needed more time to learn the healing magic.
We lacked only a few weeks to Beltane on my thirteenth summer. I wanted to participate this year, though I wondered if I dared give up my maidenhead before I finally convinced The Morrigan to teach me what I needed to know.
Tall, slim, and elegant in every gesture, The Morrigan sat beneath an apple tree. Some of her vitality and natural color had returned of late. I hadn’t seen her work true magic, exhausting magic, in almost a year. She had spread her yellow skirts around her in a graceful circle. That circle of imitation sunlight set a barrier of space no one dared penetrate. Beside her I knew myself to be merely a short and awkward acolyte who could never get all of the twigs and grass out of her unruly brown hair. My simple gown had permanent grass stains on the skirt.
“Your time in Avalon is over, Arylwren. You depart at dawn with your father,” The Morrigan said without polite inquiries about my health and well-being or my studies. My lateness must have disturbed her more than usual for such a breach of manners.
“Why must I leave Avalon now?” The pieces of my life pattern still seemed scattered.
I wondered — fantasized — if Da would take me to Curyll in time for Beltane.
“Your father is much wiser than I, Arylwren. He sees the future. I cannot.” The Morrigan looked me straight in the eye. “Father Myrddin, The Merlin, requires that you accompany him on his journeys this summer. You will join him on the mainland at dawn. Ask your questions of him.”
“I haven’t seen my father in four years. Why this year? Why won’t he wait until after Beltane?” Two young men, apprentice bards who lived on one of the nearby islands, had caught my eye this past year. Their blatant virility set my blood steaming and made my skin oversensitive to any touch. The fine linen of my shift rasped across my breasts in an agonizing kind of pleasure. Moisture between my thighs made me squirm every time I thought about those young men jumping the Beltane fires naked, strong, and eager.
If I couldn’t have Curyll, either of these bards would satisfy me quite nicely.
Imagining Curyll flying over a Beltane bonfire brought a fierce ache to my unawakened womb. The apprentice bards paled in comparison to my memories of Curyll. In my dreams, I saw him; not the fourteen-year-old boy I had last seen at Lord Ector’s fortress, but the man I had glimpsed in a vision. Tall, confident, a warrior of strength and determination.
Consciously, I calmed my pounding heart and heated body lest The Morrigan suspect where my thoughts fled.
“Your father keeps his motives secret, Arylwren. He tells me only that now you have completed your training in the ways of a priestess, you must complete your destiny away from this protected island. Away from the protection our limited numbers can give you.” The Morrigan raised her hand in dismissal. Age lines around her eyes contrasted with her apparently youthful demeanor. Rest and the strengthening tonics I fed her hadn’t replenished all of her vitality.
The three remaining Ladies of Avalon were all older than she and growing more feeble each year.
“My destiny? Do you mean marriage?” Marriage would mean never returning to Avalon, not even to check on the Ladies and help them with the daily chores. I didn’t want that yet. The Ladies deserved to live out their remaining days here in our home. They needed me to haul wood and water, to wander the fields in search of special plants, to cook and clean for them as well. They had no one else.
“The Goddess claimed you at your naming day. Only She can know for sure what life-quest awaits you. She may have given your father a glimpse of your fate. Ask him tomorrow.” The Morrigan flicked her wrist as if to shoo me away.
I wasn’t The Merlin’s daughter for nothing. I stood my ground. “Who will care for you?”
“We will manage, Wren. A different destiny awaits you.”
“My father knows my destiny?”
“Perhaps,” The Morrigan sighed. We both knew she wouldn’t get rid of me until I decided she had nothing more to tell me. Except for that one magical secret.
“Four years ago, the wandering bard known to the world outside Avalon as The Merlin, brought you to me with explicit instructions, Wren. He charged me to make you a priestess in all ways save one. I could not allow you to witness or participate in Beltane. I have kept my promise to your father. Now ’tis up to him to tell you more.” The Morrigan stood.
Something in the way she said my father’s name intrigued me.
“Are you my mother?” I blurted out the question I had longed to ask for four years. Something about the way Da had looked at her that first day on the docks.
“If I were, your life would have been different, Wren. I’d never have allowed you or your father out of my sight.” Without another word she walked back toward her hut, spine straight, head high, and fingers kneading the fabric of her yellow gown into a knot.
I followed her. “Why must I leave now, Lady? Why must I remain a virgin if for no other destiny than to satisfy a husband on a wedding night?”
“Neither the Goddess nor your father told me your destiny, child. My own fate is all too clear. I can no longer teach you or protect you.”
“Why? No one comes to this island but those you invite.”
“I am dying, Wren. By autumn my ashes will return to the earth and my spirit will soar into my next incarnation. There is no one left who can become The Morrigan.”
Grief shocked me into momentary silence. I had known she was dying for some time but denied it to myself over and over. This lovely woman had nurtured me as lovingly as a mother. I could no longer imagine life without her.
“I can be the next Morrigan. If I stay here. If I unite with the Goddess this Beltane Festival.” I spoke slowly, measuring each word. I glimpsed a piece of the future and knew I could pursue it.
“No, Wren. Your destiny lies elsewhere. Our way of life will die with me. The other Ladies will return to their families. As must you.” The Morrigan stopped walking at the doorway to her hut, as small, unadorned, and dark inside as mine. She turned to face me before ducking beneath the low lintel. “Go now, Wren. The afternoon and evening are yours. An hour before dawn I will row you across the lake to the mainland.”
“I promised to sing for my father to come for me at dawn when the time is right,” I said.
“Very well. A priestess should never break a promise, especially one made out of love.” She abruptly ended the conversation by entering her hut. That was the one place I could not, and would not follow.