Cynric could not tell if half a day or half a lifetime had passed when he realized there was no one attacking him any more. All around him lay bodies, and Bendeigid was methodically giving the mercy stroke to any that still lived. He was covered with blood, but none of it seemed to be his own. Once he had fallen and thought himself done for, but a legionary had stood above him, covering him with that big oblong shield until he could rise.
He realized that you could hate someone and still admire them. He would never love Romans, but he could see now there might be something to be learned from them. At this moment, even his own Roman blood did not seem so evil a thing. He heard a crackle of flame and saw that Ardanos was directing the burning of the enemy curraghs. The smoke stank of burnt meat, but the round, leather-covered boats burned merrily. Cynric turned away, wondering if he were going to be ill.
But one boat had been kept back, and one of the raiders had been saved alive, though blinded, to man it.
Ardanos lifted his hands to the skies, shouting something in the old speech that only the Druids used. For a moment the breeze died, then it backed and began to blow from landward. Ardanos set his hand upon the rim of the curragh, holding it.
"I have called the winds to speed you,” he told the man inside. "If the gods love you, you will come to Eriu once more. Be you our messenger, and take them this word,” Ardanos said fiercely, "that if you come again to these shores, the same will be done to every one of you.”
The vision faded, and Eilan sank back, shuddering. She had never seen serious fighting, and it filled her with horror, yet she found herself rejoicing fiercely as the raiders died. One of these men had certainly killed her mother and probably her younger sister, and set aflame the house in which she had been born.
She peered into the water, seeking the face of Gaius, but caught no sight of him. Had he fallen in some earlier skirmish with the enemy, believing her dead in the ruins of her home? Well, better that he should think her dead than faithless, she told herself, but she was surprised at how much, even now, the thought that he was the one who might have died brought her grief. The night they sat beside the Beltane fires they had seemed one being. Surely if he were killed, she could not help but know.
But presently the steady flow of her life in the Forest House washed the pain even from the memory of Gaius and what might have been.
With the others, she took her turn at gathering the sacred plants and herbs, learning which of them should be gathered by a particular light of sun or moon.
"This lore is older than the Druids,” Miellyn confided to her once when they were paired. Miellyn, although she had come to the Forest House long ago, was not many years older than Eilan and the two, as the two youngest in the house, were often paired off in their work. Miellyn had chosen to become a priestess of the healing arts, and had already had extensive training. "Some of it comes down from the old days, even before our people came into this land.”
It had been a wet spring, and along the banks of the brook that wandered through the fields behind the Forest House, the mugwort plants were waist high. The sharp pungent scent of their leaves was almost dizzying as she stripped them from their stalks. The priestesses used them to induce visions, and in an infusion to ease sore muscles.
"Caillean told me something of this,” Eilan answered. "There was a time, she says, when there were no Druid priests in Britannia. When our people came they killed the priests of the tribes they conquered, but they did not dare to kill the priestesses of the Great Mother. Our own sacred women learned from them, and added the ancient knowledge to their own.”
"It is true,” Miellyn said, moving along the riverbank. "Caillean has studied these things more than I, and she is a priestess of the Oracle. They, at least, go back to a time well before the Forest House was built and long before the Order of Druids came to this island of Britain. They say that their first priestesses came here from an island far out in the western ocean that now is sunk beneath the waves. With them came the priest men called the Merlin, who taught the lore of the stars and of the standing stones.”