Alys Clare - Heart of Ice

She whispered, ‘What is it? What are you doing?’

Huathe smiled. ‘Do not be alarmed; you are quite safe. People sometimes scare themselves here; for the unwary hear the rumours and the old tales and they come here to test them out. More than once we have had to treat foolhardy men who stamp on this sacred stone and then are terrified when the predicted response comes.’

‘What happens?’

Huathe shrugged. ‘Usually a storm, or what is perceived to be a storm.’

‘And they — these people — they are injured?’

‘Their minds are injured, for sometimes they imagine that lightning strikes them, or that it strikes trees which then fall upon them.’

‘But. .’ She was struggling to understand. ‘But these things don’t really happen?’

Huathe was smiling again. ‘Beith, there is so much you must learn. First, you have to open your mind to possibilities. Our great task is to search for the sublime, to delve into what is secret and arcane and, by so doing, achieve the uplifting that is our destiny.’

Reeling from his announcement, from the concept of opening a mind that she had never actually considered closed, she realised that he was speaking again; thankfully, for she was not sure how much more she could absorb, he had turned to matters which, in the light of her own experience, she felt better able to comprehend.

‘We use the spring water to make our divination mirror,’ Huathe was saying. ‘The water is collected in a bowl of red granite. On clear nights, Moon’s reflection in the still, dark water of the basin gives the illusion that she is drawn down to Earth and so we tell ourselves that she is temporarily within our reach.

‘But,’ he went on after a moment, ‘the water has another purpose, and it is to do with this that you have been sent here.’ He had moved away from the granite slab as he spoke and now stood beside her once more. Looking right into her eyes — into her soul, she thought, for she had no defence against his penetration and did not dare look away — he said, ‘Beith, I know what you have done. You took life and an adjustment must be made.’

Adjustment . She did not know what he meant. ‘I am to be punished?’ She heard the shake in her voice.

‘No, that would not be appropriate,’ he said quickly, looking away from her and out across the glade, ‘for to kill in self-defence or to protect those who cannot protect themselves is to us no crime. But because of your actions two men died, and your spirit carries the burden of that. The adjustment of which I speak involves recompense; in order to balance what has happened to you, you must save the lives of two people who are dying.’

‘ Me! I can’t save life, I don’t know how to!’ Huathe, still serenely smiling, ignored her outburst. She forced herself to think sensibly. Save lives. Did that mean she was to treat the sick? ‘It is true that I have a little herb lore,’ she said tentatively, ‘for I was well taught in my youth and have studied the matter more intensively in the course of the last two years. But I do not know nearly enough to save lives!’

‘Not yet,’ he remarked. ‘And it is a good beginning, young Beith, to recognise one’s ignorance.’ He turned back to face her again. ‘But you will learn,’ he said in a tone that allowed no argument, ‘and that is why you are here.’

Joanna stayed at Folle-Pensee throughout the spring and summer. It was a period of such intensive study and learning that at times she had to isolate herself from the community and, alone in the forest, try to order and make sense of the endless lore, the legends and stories, the whirling thoughts and inspirational possibilities that her teachers were instilling into her. She realised that, while people came and went from Folle-Pensee quite regularly, there remained a core of elders and teachers who were healers or instructors; sometimes, like Huathe, they were both. These elders lived in the relative comfort of the low granite cottages; for temporary residents such as Joanna, it was the shelter under the birch trees.

Not knowing how much she already knew, her teachers started at the beginning, telling her of the Goddess and the Earth that is her body; of the Earth’s natural rhythms and how the people learned the Mother’s lesson of how to position stones and mounds to maintain her body’s balance. On a starry night at the end of April, Joanna joined a procession that wound its way down through the Broceliande on the long road south-westwards to the standing stones that marched in ranks on the headland above the sea. There, in the light of the stars, she stood waiting with her people, although she did not know what they waited for.

Then the Moon rose.

The first sight of the brilliant moonlight on the endless rows of huge stones, their shadows lengthening on the springy grass as if they were an advancing army, was something that Joanna never forgot. And when she heard the chanting begin — a sole voice joined by another, then another, then more and more until it seemed that the very Earth was singing — she thought her heart would break with joy.

As if that powerful experience had been the introduction, they taught her astrology and how to make a mental map of the night sky so that, when asked where to find the Little Bear, the Swan, Cassiopeia or the Heavenly Twins, she could instantly point in the right direction. They taught her to make the association between the moving pattern of the stars over her head and the turn of the seasons on Earth below and she understood then how the two were and had always been interdependent. She learned of the fundamental link between the heavens and the people, animals and plants of Earth, and she came to know instinctively how and why a person born in late January differed from one born in mid-August, and why crops must be planted and harvested only at certain times.

At the midsummer solstice she went with her people to gather at a long, ground-hugging structure made of great granite stones, arranged so that the doorway stones allowed but a low, dark entrance into the interior. They stood vigil through the short hours of darkness and then, as the Sun rose, his first rays shot like an arrow from the eastern horizon, over the hills and vales and straight into the entrance to the long barrow. The sexual imagery was obvious and, to Joanna’s surprise, there was quite a lot of laughter and ribald joking. She asked her teachers later if this had not been disrespectful.

‘Do you not laugh and joke after the sexual act, Beith?’ they asked her. ‘Does the Goddess-given ecstasy not make you joyful?’

‘Er-’ But the answer was complex and would have taken far too long, so Joanna did not give it.

They smiled, taking her reluctance as coyness. ‘Do not be shy,’ an incredibly old woman said. ‘And do not fear to join in the fun the next time you witness the God penetrate the Goddess and you feel their passion reflected in your own body!’

They taught her how to recognise, collect and prepare the magical drugs that give insight and, in a lucky few, open the window on the future and bestow the gift of prophecy. They watched over her as she drank down the draught that her own hands had prepared and they listened to her as, deep in her own inner world, she cried out and sobbed as the images formed, broke and formed again. She learned how to channel the power and use it for the benefit of others and, in time, dreams, trance and vision became some of her most valuable and potent tools.

She learned the long history of her people. Over four successive nights leading up to Lughnasadh, she sat with her people around a fire and they listened in utter silence to one of the great bards tell the story of how they came out of the East and the Great Mother showed them the vast river that winds through the lands like the blood in the Mother’s own body. He told how she led them to the wonderfully rich and fertile area at the headwaters of three great rivers, giving them this precious piece of her body as a place in which they might settle and thrive so that, in time, their descendants grew numerous and confident and set out to spread themselves throughout the green lands. He described the journeys westwards and northwards and, because his gift of communication meant that he was aware how important it was to make a story personal for its audience, he finished by describing the very place in which they sat in the warmth of a summer night.