“I must have had a father, but even when I was very small, I knew he did nothing for my mother except to make sure that there was always a new baby at the breast.” She hesitated. “I dare say Lhiannon pitied me as a starveling.”
Caillean heard her own words, surprised that they held no bitterness; as if she had accepted all this too long ago.
“So I do not even know how old I am, not really. It was about a year or so after Lhiannon took me away before my body showed the first signs of womanhood. I think I was about twelve then.” She broke off suddenly, and Eilan looked at her in amazement.
I am a woman, a priestess, Caillean told herself, a sorceress who can frighten armed men! But the fire trance had taken her too far into memory, and she felt like a terrified child. Which was the truth? Or was the deception only in the flickering of the fire?
“I must be more shaken than I knew,” she said in a stifled voice, “or perhaps it is the hour, and the darkness, as if we had stepped outside time.” She looked at Eilan, forcing herself to honesty, “Or it may be because I am talking to you . . .”
Eilan swallowed, and steeled herself to meet the other woman’s gaze. Truth . . .tell me the truth – Caillean heard the thought as if it had been her own, and could not tell which of them had a greater need for it.
“I never told Lhiannon, and the Goddess has not struck me down . . .” She felt the words dragged out of her. “But after all these years it seems to me that perhaps someone should know.”
Eilan reached out to her, and Caillean’s fingers closed hard on her hand.
“It was the sight and sound of those raiders that made me remember. In my old home there was a man I sometimes saw on the shore. He was, I suspect, one who lived there apart from other men, an outlaw driven from his clan. I would not wonder at that,” she added bitterly. “At first I trusted him; he gave me small gifts, pretty things he had found on the shore, shells, bright feathers.” She hesitated. “More fool I for thinking him harmless; but how would I have known better? Who had there ever been to teach me?”
She stared blindly towards the fire, but there had been no light in the hut, and no light could reach her now in this place of memory. “I suspected nothing, I never knew what he wanted when he dragged me into his hut one day —” She shuddered, racked by memories for which, even now, she had no words.
“What did you do?” Eilan’s voice came from a great way off, like a distant star.
“What could I do?” Caillean said harshly, clinging to that little light. “I – I ran away, crying – crying till I thought I would melt, and filled with such horror and disgust – I can’t speak of that. It seemed there was no one I could tell, no one who would have cared.” She was silent for a long time. “To this day I remember the smell in his hut – filth, bracken, seaweed, and being pushed down on it while I whimpered — I was too young to imagine what he wanted. The smell of the sea and of bracken still makes me ill,” she added.
“Didn’t anyone ever know? Didn’t they do anything?” asked Eilan. “I think my father would kill anyone who had touched me so.”
Caillean had said it at last, and breathing was a little easier now. She let out some of the pain in a long, shuddering, sigh. “Wild as our tribe was, women could not be molested, nor a child so young. Had I accused my attacker, he would have come to the wicker cage and roasted in a slow fire. He knew it, when he threatened me. But I did not know it then.” She spoke with a strange detachment now, as if it had all happened to someone else.