"Why, Eilan, you are a healer-priestess already,” Cynric said. "Gawen, you can lean on me if you like. Of course, Eilan’s much prettier than I am, so perhaps I should help Dieda,” he said, his face brightening, and he took Dieda’s arm as they started back along the path. "I think you had better go straight back to bed instead of getting up for supper, Gawen. Eilan will bring it to you. I worked too hard on that arm to have you undo all my labor.”
THREE
The dwelling of the Priestess of the Oracle was square, like a shrine, surrounded by a roofed portico and set a little apart from the other buildings within Vernemeton’s walls. Although folk referred to the whole enclosure as the Forest House, in truth it was an entire community whose clustered buildings were connected by covered walkways. Gardens and courtyards lay between them so that the whole was like a maze. Only the dwelling of the High Priestess was set apart from the others, just as only she was surrounded by the kind of absolute simplicity that is harder to maintain than the most rigid ritual.
When the Arch-Druid Ardanos arrived, he was ushered into her presence at once by her attendant priestess, a tall dark-haired woman called Caillean. She was clothed much like the High Priestess in a robe of dark blue linen, but Lhiannon’s arm rings and the torque at her throat were of pure gold, while those of her attendant were of silver.
"You may go, child,” Lhiannon told Caillean.
Ardanos waited until the striped door-curtain had closed behind her, then smiled. "She is no longer a child, Lhiannon. Many winters have passed since you came here with her to the Forest House.”
"True, I lose track of the years,” Lhiannon replied.
She was, the Druid Ardanos reflected dispassionately, an exceptionally beautiful woman still. He had known her for many years and was probably the nearest thing to a friend of her own generation yet living. When he had been younger, this had cost him many sleepless nights; he was now elderly and seldom even remembered how she had disturbed his peace.
All the priestesses of the Forest House at Vernemeton, the Most Sacred Grove, were chosen as much for their beauty as for any other attribute. It always surprised him. He could understand that a god might wish to be served by beautiful women, especially if he were some worthless Roman deity, but it did not accord with what he knew of women that a goddess should wish her servitors to be too beautiful.
His silence was not in the least constrained by the presence of the great churl Huw, who bore a cudgel and was stationed at the door, and who would immediately dash out the brains of any man—even the Arch-Druid himself—who made an offensive move or spoke a disrespectful word to the Priestess. Ardanos, of course, had no such intention; Huw’s presence simply assured Lhiannon’s safety and allowed her a freedom in entertaining visitors not permitted to others.
Ardanos knew that he did not look sufficiently venerable to grace the office of Arch-Druid, nor was he the Merlin of Britain reborn. But he consoled himself with the thought that Lhiannon no longer looked much like the living incarnation and prophetess of the Holy Goddess of Wisdom and Inspiration either. She was gracious and gentle and her face was refined by austerity, but for the rest she was just an aging woman, though her hair was so fair it was all but impossible to detect the greying strands he knew must be there. Her dark blue sacramental gown fell in stiff and unbecoming folds. The straight shoulders had begun to droop a little with fatigue. Ardanos felt his own age the more in beholding such clear signs of hers.
In recent years, in deference to her age, Lhiannon had begun to wear a headcloth, as most matrons and older women did, except when her hair was unbound for ritual. And yet, Ardanos reflected, for twenty years—and he had known her for most of them—this woman’s face and form had been central to their faith, and through her lips had come, if not the literal word of the gods, then that word as it was interpreted by the priests of the Oracle.
And so perhaps there was something of divinity in the aging woman’s face after all, a divinity that clung like a fragrance. Perhaps it was something invested there by the multitudes for whom this woman appeared as the Goddess herself; not, for them, a mere symbol of their faith, but in their literal child-minds, the Goddess-self—the great Virgin Mother of the Tribes, Lady of the Land in living form.