Druids Read Free

moving bodies I glimpsed something white lying on the raised stone slab used for sacrifices.
     
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    Morgan Llywelyn
    I thought I understood. A gift of life would be offered in exchange for a gift from the Otherworid.
    The adult members of the tribe were privileged to attend all the sacrifices except those which involved some secret ritual, like this one. Children, however, were forbidden. But we boys sometimes re-created the sacrifices for ourselves, using some hapless
    lizard or rodent.
    For the son of a warrior, I was strangely squeamish about see-ing blood shed. It troubled my belly. I always let someone else take the role of the sacrificer, and I dropped my eyes at the crucial moment when the others were watching the knife. I was great at chanting and exhorting, however.
    Now the real chanters and exhorters were at work. Their voices filled the grove, calling on the sacred names of sun and wind and water while their feet wove a complex pattern on the earth. Chanting rose to thunder amid me oaks.
    Then Menua lifted his arms. Like the bare twigs of the trees, his fingers clawed space. By his gesture, sound was torn from the grove, hurled into the air, gone. The other druids halted in mid-step, freezing the pattern.
    The air crackled with gathering magic.
    Menua flung back his hood. In me style of the Order, his head was shaved across the front from ear to ear, leaving a bald dome
    of forehead surrounded by a flaring mane of white hair. In sharp contrast were the black eyebrows that almost met above his nose. Menua was only of average height for a Gaulish man, but he was wide and solid, and the voice booming from his chest was the
    voice of the oaks.
    “Hear us!” he cried to That Which Watched. “See us! Inhale our breath and know us for a part of you!”
    I shrank inside my tunic. My crawling flesh informed me of a Presence, larger than human, occupying visibly empty space, aware of Menua and the druids. And of me. A terrible, awesome power, gathering itself in the grove.
    “The seasons are entangled,” Menua was saying. “Spring cannot free itself from winter. Hear us, heed our cries! Your sun does not heat the earth and soften her womb so she will accept seed and grow grain. The animals will not mate. Soon we will have no cows for milk and leather, no sheep for meat and wool.
    “The pattern of the weather is damaged. Our bards tell us that we came to Gaul many generations ago because the patterns of existence had been damaged in our homeland to the east. We had
    DRUIDS
     
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    too many births and not enough food. We fled here to save ourselves, and in this land learned to live in harmony with the earth.
    “Now that harmony has somehow been disturbed and must be put right. The confusion of the seasons threatens not only the Camutes, but our neighbors the Senones, the Parish, the Bituriges. Even such powerful tribes as the Arvemi and the Aedui are suffering. All Gaul is suffering.”
    Menua paused to draw breath. When he spoke again, his voice was thick with pleading. “We implore the help of the Otherworid. Aid us in healing the pattern. Inspire us, guide us. In exchange we shall offer the most precious gift we have to give, not the spirit of a criminal or an enemy, but the spirit of our oldest and wisest, a person revered by all the tribe.
    ‘ ‘We send you the spirit of one who bore the deaths of her children with courage and never failed to give good counsel in the circle of elders. Her spark comes to join yours, life moving to life. Accept our offering. Help us in our need.”
    Gesturing to Aberth the sacrificer, Menua lowered his arms. Aberth stepped forward, throwing back his hood to reveal himself to That Which Watched. He had a foxy face and fox-colored hair behind his tonsure, and a curly red beard that never grew below his jaw. On his arm a circlet of wolf fur denoted his talent for killing.
    Strapped to his waist was the sacrificial knife with its gold hilt.
    The chanting began again, low