A table of hewn boards ran down the center, with heavy benches to either side. Warmth was provided by a hearth at either end of the hall. Near these a mixed number of men and women and even a few children were assembling. Heavily bearded men in roughly woven smocks talked to one another in a dialect so crude Gaius could not understand a word.
Although his tutor had taught him that the Latin familia originally meant all who shared living quarters: master, children, freedmen, and slaves, the Romans now kept their serving folk apart from the family. Cynric mistook his look of mild distaste for weakness, and hastened to lead him to a cushioned seat at the upper end of the long room.
Here, a little apart from the mixed crew at the lower end of the table, the lady of the house was seated on a wide chair. Near by, another seat, covered with a bearskin, was evidently reserved for the master. Other wide settles and benches were occupied by several young men and women whose finer garments and well-bred manners proclaimed them children or fosterlings of the household, or perhaps upper servants. The lady of the house nodded at the boys but did not interrupt her conversation with an old man seated near the hearth, tall and gaunt as an elderly ghost, with grey hair curled and cut in almost foppish fashion. His beard was grey, too, and elaborately curled. Green eyes twinkled in the old man’s face; his long tunic was of snowy white, embroidered lavishly, and the small wire-strung harp by his side was trimmed and ornamented with gold.
A bard! But that was not so surprising in a Druid’s hall. It needed only a soothsayer to have all of the three classes of Druid that Caesar had described represented here. But a diviner might have seen through the young Roman’s disguise. As it was, the old bard favored Gaius with a long glance that made the skin prickle along his backbone before the old man turned to his hostess again.
Cynric said in an undertone, “You know my stepmother Rheis; this is the bard Ardanos, I call him grandfather, for he is my foster mother’s father; I am an orphan.”
This silenced Gaius completely, for he had heard of Ardanos in the headquarters of the Legion. He was believed to be a powerful Druid, perhaps the chief of those who remained in the British Isles. Although at first glance Ardanos looked like any other harper about to play, his every gesture compelled the eye. Not for the first time, Gaius wondered how he would escape with a whole skin.
He was glad to drop on to a bench near the hearth and be ignored. Although it was still bright outside, he felt a chill, and welcomed the heat of the fire. It had been a long time since he had needed to remember the ways of his mother’s kin. He hoped he would not make a mistake that would betray him.
Cynric went on, “My sister Eilan you know; beside her is my mother’s sister Dieda.” Eilan was sitting near Rheis. Cynric laughed at Gaius’s astonishment as next to Eilan he saw another girl in green linen, leaning against the back of her chair and listening to the old bard. For just a moment she seemed as like to Eilan as one oak leaf to another; then he saw that the girl Cynric had named Dieda was a little older, and that she had blue eyes, where Eilan’s were almost grey. Vaguely he remembered seeing two faces looking down at him from the edge of the boar pit, but he had thought that delirium.
“There are really two of them; they are more alike than twins, are they not?”
It was true, but Gaius was suddenly certain that the sureness with which he had recognized Eilan would always remain with him. All his life he would be one of the few who could tell the two women apart as if by instinct. A fragment of memory bound up with pain and fire came to him – Eilan had dreamed about him.
And now that he considered them, he could see that they were unlike in many small ways too; Dieda was a little taller, and her hair lay flat and smooth against her forehead while Eilan’s escaped from its binding in a tiny halo of curls. Dieda’s face was smooth and pale and perfect, she looked solemn; Eilan looked rosy, as if her face had caught the sunlight and held it there.