Eilan stared at her. “Could I?”
“If you were taught, certainly,” said Caillean with a trace of impatience. “If you had the trust, and the will. But I cannot show you now. Perhaps in the Forest House, if you come there.”
The reality of what they had escaped burst over Eilan then and she dropped down upon the seat next to the priestess, shuddering. “They would . . .they would have -” Eilan swallowed. “We all owe you our lives.”
“Oh, I think not,” said Caillean. “A woman in childbed is small temptation even to such as these. And I might well have been able to frighten them from me; but you, yes; rape is the least you could have expected from them. They do not kill fair young girls; but you might well have ended a captive wife, if you so call it, on the shores of wild Eriu. If that is a fate that would have pleased you, I am sorry to have interfered.”
Eilan shuddered, remembering the feral faces of the men. “I think not. Are the men all like that in your land?”
“I do not know. When I left it I was still very young.” After a moment’s silence Caillean went on. “I do not remember either my mother or my father, only that in the hut where we lived – all of us – there were seven children smaller than I. One day we went to the market and Lhiannon was there. I had never seen anyone so beautiful.
“And something – I know not what – reached out to her, for she cast her cloak over me, thus claiming me in the oldest of rites for the gods. Years later, I asked her why she had chosen me from all the others there. She said that she had seen that the others there were cleanly dressed and that their parents clung to them. There was no one to cling to me,” she added somewhat bitterly. “In the home of my parents I was only another mouth to feed. Nor was my name Caillean; my mother — I do not really remember her — she called me Lon-dubh, Blackbird.”
“Is Caillean a priestess name then?”
Caillean smiled. “It is not,” she said. “Caillean, in our tongue, means only ‘my child, my girl’. So Lhiannon called me whenever she spoke to me; I think of myself now by no other name.”
“Should I call you that then?”
“You should, though I do have another name given me by the priestesses. I am sworn never to speak it aloud or even whisper it, save to another priestess.”
“I see.” Eilan stared at her, then blinked, because for a moment a name had echoed in her awareness as loudly as if it had been spoken. Isarma . . .when you were my sister, Isarma was your name . . .
Caillean sighed, “Well, dawn is still far off. See, your sister has already fallen back into slumber. Poor lass, the birth exhausted her. You should sleep as well —”
Eilan shook her head, trying to bring the world back into focus. “After such a disturbance, I do not think I could sleep even if I tried.”
Caillean looked at her and suddenly laughed. “Well, to be truthful, neither can I! Those men terrified me so that I could scarce speak. I thought I had forgotten their dialect – the last time I heard it was so long ago.”
“You did not look terrified,” said Eilan. “You looked like a goddess standing there.” She heard once more the other woman’s bitter laugh.
“Things are not always as they seem, my little one. You must learn not to put all your trust in how folk look, or in what they say.”
Eilan stared into the fire, whose embers, stirred back to life by Caillean’s raking, snapped and sparkled on the hearth. The man she had learned to care for as Gawen had been an illusion, but even as Gaius the Roman, the thing that made her love him was the same. And he had spoken truth to her. I would know him, she thought then, if he came to me as a leper or a wild man. For a moment she grasped at something that lay beyond face or form or name. Then a coal snapped, and it was gone.