Alys Clare - The Way Between the Worlds

The wooden enclosure was one of our most profound mysteries and somehow connected with the ancestors who had died and gone before us into the next world. When I asked my beloved Granny Cordeilla about it, she told me that the place the ancestors now inhabited was beneath our world, a mirror image of it that stretched out below our feet. When first she told me this, I was troubled by the thought that my forebears would have to walk upside down, but Granny assured me that such things presented no problem whatsoever in the next life. She would know for herself now, I reflected with a smile. I had loved my Granny dearly, and I missed her all the time.

When Edild first mentioned the enclosure off the north coast, she had promised to take me there one day, once I was further advanced in my studies and old enough to understand its power and its strange pull. Did that — I hardly dared to hope — mean she knew where it was? And, even more crucially, would she deem that I was now ready to confront it?

I had to ask her.

I nerved myself, crept a little closer to her and said, ‘Edild? I had a dream.’

She turned to me instantly, her full attention on me. She knew about dreams; she must also have known that I would not have mentioned it to her — especially under our present circumstances — unless it had been significant: what we call a power dream, in which, or so we believe, the spirits are trying to get an important message through to us.

She said simply, ‘Tell me,’ and I did.

I described the procession, the spectral voice and the salt-marsh location, and I told her in detail about the wooden circle and the quicksand. I did not, however, tell her that I thought I’d heard Rollo calling out to me. I could not bear to share the faint hope that he was still alive with anybody, not even my aunt.

When I had finished, she sat in thought for what seemed a long time. Then she said, ‘You know, I believe, where this place is.’

‘I think so, yes. You told me about the sacred place of our ancestors, off the north coast where the sands run into the sea. Is it — does it look like what I described?’

‘It doesn’t now,’ she replied swiftly, ‘for it vanished under the waves a very long time ago. Occasionally, a very strong tide or a particularly powerful storm will uncover it for a few days, but it always disappears again. Few who now live have ever seen it,’ she added with a sigh, ‘and the legends say it is changed beyond recognition. The high walls of strong timber have worn away, and the oak stump is breaking up.’

‘It wasn’t like that in my dream,’ I whispered. ‘It looked freshly built, and we were carrying something out to it.’ I told her about the four big men and the bier they bore on their shoulders.

She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. ‘I should have loved to share your vision,’ she said very quietly.

I wished I could have placed my dream inside her head. It was far beyond my powers. ‘What were we doing out there?’ I asked. ‘What was being carried out to the circle?’

‘We cannot know for sure,’ she said. ‘We can only guess. Those people lived so long ago, and all we can know of them comes to us through our ancient legends and our own blood.’

‘Were they our ancestors?’ I wondered how we could possibly tell.

Edild smiled, a small, private smile. ‘We don’t know that, either,’ she said. ‘They lived in the land where our ancestors lived, and our own stories go back a very long way. It’s possible.’

A thought was slowly taking shape in my head, and I tried to put it into words. ‘I really felt as if I were that person in the procession,’ I said slowly. ‘She could do what I could — find the hidden path, I mean — and I had the strong sense that she was me in an earlier time, that I was seeing through the eyes of one of my own forbears.’

Edild nodded. ‘I have heard Hrype say much the same thing,’ she said. ‘He, too, believes that we share our skills with our ancestors; that such things come down through the generations in the same way that the colour of our hair does.’

I nodded, letting her words sink in. Then I murmured, ‘You said we can only guess what they were doing. Will you tell me?’

‘I will.’ She composed herself, then said, ‘The ancient people made a place of power, out there on the foreshore. It was a magical place, where the element of water meets the element of land and neither one nor the other truly prevails. One of our most obscure and incomprehensible legends tells of the upturned oak stump that you saw in your dream, its roots raised to the sky and its massive trunk thrust down through the crust of this world into the underworld.’

‘Which mirrors this one,’ I added. ‘Granny Cordeilla told me.’

‘Yes,’ Edild murmured. ‘Yes, she believed that to be true.’

‘Do you?’

She shrugged. ‘I do not know.’

‘What did they use the oak stump for?’ I had a feeling I already knew.

She sighed. ‘The myth says it was where a very important member of the tribe was put after death. The body was borne in state across the sands, taken into the wood circle and laid out on the upturned oak stump’s roots. It was — it is — a crossing place.’

‘Where land meets sea,’ I supplied. ‘Yes.’

She gave me a strange look. ‘Also,’ she whispered, ‘where souls cross over.’

I felt a shudder run down my back. Where souls cross over. .

‘The ceremonies went on for days,’ Edild was saying dreamily. ‘The people all wished to honour their dead leader, and they knew they would be bereft. The dead one had been a mighty sorcerer — perhaps the greatest that ever lived — and the people had no idea how they would survive without the protective magic they had taken for granted through all the long years.’

‘Did they survive?’ I whispered.

‘Yes,’ Edild answered, ‘if the tales are to be believed.’ She glanced at me, one eyebrow raised as if she were faintly mocking herself. ‘For here we are.’

We sat in silence for what felt like a long time. Edild was watching Elfritha, and I was watching my aunt. I was trying to work out how to ask her the question that was all but bursting out of me in such a way that she would answer it in the way I wanted.

In the end, there was no need. She had just finished bathing Elfritha’s face, chest and arms, and she put her washcloth down with a sigh, turning to me.

‘It is inadvisable to ignore the summons of a power dream,’ she said gravely.

My heart leapt. Did she mean what I thought she did? ‘Er — it really takes two of us, to look after Elfritha,’ I hedged.

Edild rinsed out the cloth. ‘Elfritha does not need much nursing. I can manage alone.’

‘Will Hrype be back soon?’ I didn’t like the thought of leaving her on her own.

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

I knew better than to ask where he’d gone. Knowing him and his secret ways, it was quite possible he hadn’t told her, and I didn’t want to put her in the awkward position of having to confess her ignorance to me.

She turned to look at me, her face intent. ‘Do you know where to go?’

I shook my head, hardly daring to breathe.

‘In that case,’ she said — and I could hear her reluctance in her grave tone — ‘I’d better tell you.’

Hrype was sitting under a low hazel hedge that meandered from the rear wall of the abbey down to where the water lapped against the shore of the little island. He had been there for a long time, so deep in thought that he had not noticed the chill night air. His mind was far away; he had been walking with the spirits.

He had been unable to remain in the little room where Edild and Lassair were fighting to save Elfritha’s life. Neither of the two healers seemed very interested in discussing, or even thinking about, who had poisoned the young nun, and the question that so fascinated Hrype — was the same person responsible for the deaths of the man in the fen and Elfritha’s friend? — did not appear to engage them in the least.