It was a time of death and omens, on Avalon as well as elsewhere. A network of connections kept the High Priestess informed of what was going on in the Empire, and from time to time one of the boatmen of the Lake village would bring a leather tube containing a message, or the messenger himself, who was led blindfolded to the house of the Lady to give his news. I always suspected that the High Priestess heard much that was never passed on to the rest of our community.
However, the news that the self-made emperor Postumus had been assassinated by his own troops when he refused to hand over the spoils of a captured town was deemed essential knowledge, for it was he who had divided the West, including Britannia, from the remainder of the Empire. A man called Victorinus had assumed his title, but rumour held that he was a warrior of the bed-chamber whose adulteries were already eroding his support. It was his mother Victorina, said the reports, who really ruled the Imperium Galliarum now.
But to those of us who dwelt on the holy isle these tales meant little, for at the end of the winter Sian, Ganeda’s daughter and likely heir, lost her own battle with the illness that had come upon her after the birth of her second child, and the community of Avalon was plunged into mourning.
The year that followed seemed to promise little improvement. We heard that the people of the Mediterranean, swept by plague and famine, were blaming their troubles on the Emperor, and Gallienus, like his western rival, fell to an assassin’s blade. Of his successor, Claudius, little was known save that he came from somewhere on the Danu, and was said to be a good general. We worried more about the Saxon sea-raiders who were attacking the southern coasts of Britannia in ever greater numbers.
Still, the Saxon shore was far away. As the year turned towards harvest, my own time of testing was approaching quickly, and that gave me a more immediate reason to fear. Our final lessons were the responsibility of the High Priestess, and now that Ganeda was once more forced to acknowledge my existence, it was clear that she had not learned to love me any better than before.
Sometimes it seemed to me that she blamed me for being alive and healthy when her own child lay cold in the ground. I knew that she hoped I would fail the tests that determined who was worthy to be called a priestess of Avalon. But would she so far betray her own vows as to use her powers to make sure?
I woke each morning with a knot in my belly, and approached the garden beside the house of the High Priestess where we had our lessons as if it were a battlefield.
“Soon you will be sent out beyond the mists to the outer world, to bend time and space, if you can, to return to Avalon.”
It was a fair day just after midsummer, and through the leaves of the hawthorn hedge I could glimpse the blue glitter of the Lake. Today the mists were only a thin haze on the horizon. It was hard to believe that beyond them lay a different world.
It seemed to me that the gaze of the High Priestess rested on me a little longer than on the others. I glared back at her, but I retained a vivid memory of how it had felt to come through the mists the first time, when Suona opened the gateway between the isle of the priestesses and the world of men. At that moment, with no training whatsoever, it had seemed to me that I almost understood what was happening. If the test was a fair one, with all the training I had received I did not think that I would fail.
“But you must understand,” Ganeda continued, “that you are not only being given a challenge, but a choice. You will go forth in the dress of a woman of that world, with gold enough to take you wherever you might wish to go, and provide you with a dowry when you have got there. No vows will bind you, save only a geas against revealing the secrets of Avalon. You are young yet, for all our learning, and have barely begun to taste life’s joys. To discipline the mind and the body, to go without food or sleep, to lie with a man only for the Lady’s purposes, never your own, is to give up what the Goddess offers every woman born. You must consider whether you truly wish to return.”