Some part of me knew what he was doing—offering me an antidote to Genvissa. “Thank you,” I said, and he smiled and, a hand gently on my elbow, guided me through Llanbank.
LLANBANK WAS LARGER THAN I THOUGHT, AND I SAID as much.
Coel explained that Llanbank was the largest settlement in Llangarlia, catering as it did both to the trade routes that crisscrossed Llangarlia and to the proximity of the Veiled Hills, the sacred heart of the land. He explained a little about the Veiled Hills, pausing briefly at a crossroads within Llanbank so we could look north across the Llan to where the hills rose in the distance.
‘Where is the mist?” I said. “Every day that I have been here thus far the hills have been veiled in fog.”
‘Sometimes they wish to hide themselves, sometimes to reveal themselves,” he said. “Perhaps, because we are close to the Slaughter Festival, they have decided to—”
‘The what ?”
He grinned at the expression on my face. “The Slaughter Festival,” he repeated. “That most sacred festival of the year when we seize all strangers within our midst and sacrifice them to the great gods Og and Mag…”
He saw the horror on my face and burst out laughing. “I jest only, Cornelia. The Slaughter Festival is the autumn festival where we give thanks to Og and Mag for the harvests of spring and summer, and also slaughter the stock we cannot keep over winter. Despite its name, it is a celebration of great joy, and much good-hearted mischief. Ah, I am sorry, Cornelia, I did not mean to scare you.”
To my shame, the tears were now flowing freely down my face (I cannot believe I was spending all this time weeping in Coel’s company!). It was not his ill-timed jest as such, but that the scare it had given me had brought to the surface all my fears about Genvissa.
‘Did she frighten you that much?” he said, very soft. Then, very slowly, very gently, he gathered myself and Achates in his arms, and held us tight. He rested his chin on my head and, as I sobbed the harder, rocked me tenderly back and forth, as if I were the baby and not Achates.
‘Genvissa is not greatly loved by many among my people,” he said eventually, once my sobs had quieted somewhat. “You are not the only one she terrifies.”
He tipped my face up to his, and kissed me—without lust, or passion, or even love, but deep with reassurance and comfort, those two things I needed most.
Again he grinned. “I would not have done that if I had known I would have made you weep again,” he said, and I managed to wipe away my tears and return his smile.
‘Now,” he said, “my mother’s house is not far from here, and I can feel you shivering from both cold and hunger, so it is to my mother that I must take you.”
As he led me down the road, I realized we were in the heart of Llanbank, and that we’d been standing there, close together, embracing, while about us people walked and gossiped. The circular, stone-walled houses were everywhere about us, crowding on either side of the roadway, and while some people were idling about, gossiping over outdoor cooking fires, others were making the way down the street with baskets of produce or herding small flocks of sheep or goats.
I blushed, for shame at what Coel and I had been doing, and then realized that no one had taken much note. Many people called out greetings to Coel, or stopped him for a word or two, but there was no derision or mockery in anyone’s voices, and only a simple curiosity expressed about my presence.
To everyone who stopped, Coel introduced me as “Mother Cornelia,” the head of my household, and that made me smile at the thought of Brutus being relegated to the status of the breeding stallion who was kept in his stall most months of the year, and only allowed out when he was needed for mating purposes.
People smiled at me, and said welcoming words, and blessed Achates, and treated me as one among many… as one of them, which the Trojans had never done.
As we progressed (now somewhat slowly) down the road toward Coel’s house, I began to cheer up considerably.
Coel’s home was as most other houses—a circular, thick stone-walled house with a conical roof of thatch. There was a woman standing outside, watching our progress down the road toward her, waiting patiently for our arrival.
I glanced surreptitiously at her the closer we came, curious, and somewhat nervous, at what she would make of me… and of her son bringing me into her house.
But I need not have worried. Coel’s mother, Erith, was a tiny woman, almost birdlike in her manners and movements, and possessed of such a mischievous sense of humor that every third remark made me grin. She was much older than I, and I thought that Coel must have been a child of her later years, but she was possessed of so much life that I wondered, despite her lines, if she was still producing children even now.
She welcomed me at the door of her house with a hug and a laugh, gently chiding Coel for taking so long to bring me to her, then led me inside.
I stopped the instant I stepped inside the house, stunned by its beauty.
The house that Coel had given us on the outskirts of Llanbank had been bare inside, save for the necessary furnishings and blankets needed for our comfort, and with the experience of the isolated and functional hamlets we’d stayed at on our travels from Totnes to Llanbank, I’d thought that all houses must be the same.
But this interior, this was a miracle of color and life and movement. Like our house, there was a second level, a wooden platform resting on the inner circle of wooden posts that supported the top of the
conical roof. From this platform were a series of woven banners and ribbons, in every hue of nature, that moved on every breath of air. Among the banners and ribbons hung pieces of carved antler and bone, as well as tiny pieces of quartz hung on slivers of almost invisible gut, pieces of hide and fur, carved seashells, and what I thought was probably dyed seaweed. All these strange things had been hung so cunningly, and with such understanding, that even though the effect should have been that of an overcrowding of completely incompatible objects, they all merged to create instead a sense of grace and light and movement.
It was as though Erith and her family had managed to hang all that was most beautiful and wondrous in the world of nature from the central raised wooden platform.
Erith saw my face and, in what I was realizing was her normal reaction to most things, laughed. “This is our living house,” she said, a soft hand in the small of my back guiding me toward the central hearth.
“We have a smaller house at the back of this one in which we cook and weave and do all the snarling at each other that all families need to do.” She grinned. “No one dares snarl in this our living house.”
There was a bench of stone built about the hearth, and I sat down, still staring about me. The house was much larger than the one I shared with Brutus and our companions, with sleeping niches for at least fifteen people, and room for far more about the hearth.
Indeed, there were already some eight other women and two men seated about who, as Erith introduced me, all came up to me, took my hands between theirs, and kissed me a welcome on my cheek. Most of their names fled my head as soon as they were spoken, I was still so overcome with wonder at both Erith and her house, but I retained enough wit to understand that they comprised two of Erith’s elder sisters (and if I’d thought Erith tiny and birdlike in her age, then these two women looked as if the merest breath of wind might shatter their fragile bones), three of her daughters (two of whom were noticeably pregnant, and one of whom—a woman named Tuenna—had two toddlers playing at a safe distance from the hearth), one a cousin visiting from the north, and the final two were grown granddaughters. The men, both older than Coel, were his brothers, and I was given to understand that there was another brother as well as two uncles who, in the Llangarlian manner, still lived in the house of their maternity, but who currently were out minding the family’s flocks of sheep and goats.
One of Erith’s daughters, the one farthest forward in her pregnancy, brought me a bowl of broth that, despite what I’d told Coel earlier, made my mouth water with hunger. Erith took Achates from me—I found I did not mind in the least her presumption—and bade me eat.