“Not you, silly!” exclaimed Crispa, reaching up to pat the carven flank of the hound in the lap of the third figure in the frieze. “And one has a baby, and the other two have fruit and a loaf of bread. Are they goddesses?”
“They are the Goddess—but She has many faces, as many faces as there are mothers in the world, and when they grow old and leave their bodies to pass over to the Otherworld they continue to watch over their children…”
I had tried to keep my voice calm, but Crispa was a sensitive child, and she climbed into my lap and put her arms around my neck.
“Avia, will you always watch over me?”
As I hugged her, I felt an ache in my throat, and knew it was not caused by shortness of breath, but unshed tears.
That night my illness reached a crisis. Gasping for breath, I saw terror in the faces of Cunoarda and Lena, and could not comfort them.
“Shall I send for a priest?” asked Cunoarda anxiously.
I managed a bark of laughter. “What use? I have already been buried! You heard the funeral oration Bishop Sylvester gave!” Then I began to cough again.
At the height of my paroxysms I would have welcomed death gladly, and continued to fight only because the two women begged me not to leave them alone.
A little after midnight, the mint-scented steam with which Cunoarda filled the room began to relieve me, and I was able to drink some comfrey tea. At length I fell into a state halfway between sleep and waking, cradled against Lena’s breast.
During the crisis, I had raged against my weakness, unready to go into the night. But now, I realized that in our old age, what we lose in infancy is miraculously given back. Instead of crying in the dark for the mother who abandoned us before we were able to stand alone, now, with children and kindred having come and gone, we are free. In our darker moments we feel ourselves wholly alone, weak, aged. But in the end the Mother is given back to us and we are reborn, going back to infancy, lying in trust on the breasts of our daughters…
Everything is taken from us, even God; we spend ourself to the death. And then the Goddess comes back to us. From becoming the Goddess, the mother, we have created the Goddess in our daughters, our sisters, as we turn to Her, knowing that even if we must die still not knowing anything else, we die in Her arms and on Her breast.
But I did not die. Waking to the clear light of morning in Lena’s arms, I took a deep breath and rejoiced as the life-giving air filled my lungs. Nonetheless, I was desperately weak, and I could feel my heart bound in my breast. For the first time I faced the possibility that this body might fail me before I reached my goal.
I remembered times during my illnesses when death would have been a welcome release. At other moments I had called on the teachings of Avalon to counter my panicked fear. I had reason to believe that death was only a passage from one kind of existence to another, but I had still dreaded the moment of transition. Now, however, I realized that my fears were not for myself but for those I would leave behind me.
“You are awake!” Lena exclaimed as she felt me stir. “And you are better, thank the gods!”
“For now, but if I do not recover, I must tell you how to get to Avalon.”
Lena’s cheeks grew pink with embarrassment. “Do you mean it is a real place? I thought you were speaking as the poets do, to describe the safety we would find in Britannia.”
I opened my mouth to correct her, then closed it, realizing how deeply ingrained was the prohibition against telling outsiders of the sacred isle.
“It is real, though… difficult… to attain. It lies in the land called the Summer Country. There is a vale between two lines of hills, so low that when the rivers are in flood or the winter storms back up the tides the water covers it, and any bit of higher ground becomes an island. And there is one such, crowned by a pointed tor, that is called Inis Witrin.