Bog Queen - 5

I t was bright and fine the day we set out for Camulodunon, and the horses were eager and all the auguries were good. I wore my blue dress made of sturdy northern wool, and the red cloak my mother had brought with her from Aremorio, where she was born. I took with me the neighbors’ son Crab, who has a calm and easy manner and is good with horses, as well as my youngest brother, my favorite, Aesu. We left early in the morning and took the forest road, the river road having been partially flooded in the recent rain and, according to Crab, still covered in a thick squelchy muck that could snap a horse’s ankle.

This was the first long journey I had undertaken in my official capacity, and I admit I felt powerful and sat high in the saddle as we passed by the potter’s house and the forge on our way to the moss. I had been the druid for two seasons at that point, and everyone said I was doing very well. I had reformed the recordkeeping so that each family’s sheep were clearly marked and accounted for, and the lowland farmers could no longer simply claim the upland animals as their own when they wandered across the creek and into the lowland pasture to graze, as was their wont in summer. I had also adjudicated several disputes, including a serious one between Butu the blacksmith’s son and his neighbor Duro, who had cut off two of Butu’s fingers in a threshing accident. My decision in this case (two sheep and a goat to be paid to Butu’s family along with all the grain threshed on the day of the accident) did not satisfy everyone, but I believe it was widely regarded as fair and wise. In addition to all this, I had organized a festival dedicated to our town gods, after which we had the richest harvest in five years, with enough grain to put away for the winter and plenty more to sell at a handsome profit in the summer markets.

So it was with pride but not surprise that I had received the invitation to appear before the new king in the great city to the south. Even my mother had never been granted an audience at Camulodunon, but the young king had made it known that he was anxious to strengthen his relationship with the northern towns, and ours, though not large, was known for the strong swords and helmets from its forge. We brought with us gifts—a shield, three arm-rings, and a drinking cup—as tribute and to show the king the quality of our wares and the advantages of an alliance with us. Crab had packed them carefully into his horse’s saddlebags; on my shoulder as I rode I carried a leather satchel, heavy with our offering to the gods.

Unlike the river road, which is well-trod by farmers on their way to market, the forest road is quiet and peaceful, a pleasant beginning to a long journey. With light hearts we passed by the Small Rock and the Large Rock, and the stand of pine that my mother had consecrated to the old druid when he died, and then we arrived at the moss.

It was my first time performing the offering on my own, and my heart pounded in my chest as I accepted the materials from Crab. His mild countenance, his eyes the blue-gray of the river after rain, eased my mind a little as I strapped the heavy satchel to my back and set off on foot.

The morning was warm and the moss was bright with new growth, a carpet of green stretching from the forest road to the river road in one direction, and in the other from the rise where we performed our festivals to the wild woods where the wolves howled and the deer nestled in the shadows with their fawns. All children in the village learned that the moss was treacherous, that what looked like solid ground was in fact a thin skin over murky water that would take hold of an unsuspecting wanderer by the ankles and pull her down and down into the place from which no one returns alive. But only I, as the future druid, had learned the safe path to the place where the gods exchanged with us: our offerings for their favor.

My mother had walked the moss with me many times during my training, showing me how to use the lines of sedge and horsetail as a guide. But once I took on the role of druid, she explained, I would have to go alone. She did not say so, but I understood this as a test, one from which even my mother could not shield me.

At first my path was easy enough—the ground, though soft, held my weight and did not betray me. But when I came to the center of the moss, the most holy and also the most dangerous part because the pools there were the deepest, I made what I thought was the right move and then felt the surface give way, my left leg plunging knee-deep into the wet darkness. Moving as though under its own power, my leg jerked sharply back to free itself, but the muck beneath responded in kind and held me fast, and there I stood half-trapped in the low place that forms the edge of the world.

I was sweating, insects screamed and circled me to bite, and overhead I saw the black wings of the crows whose job it is to pick clean what the gods do not. I remembered, however, a lesson from my mother: that panic drives a stuck body deeper into the moss, and that only the slowest, surest motion will make the mud release its grip. I took a deep breath. I remembered the dance we had performed at the recent festival, in the cool sunrise, the swallows wheeling overhead and the seven of us below, anointed that morning with milk and saltwater for the celebration, our arms sweeping up and back, up and back.

Smooth, calm as I could, thinking of beauty: In this way I freed my trapped leg from the mire. But now around me was all confusion; I had lost count of my steps and track of the landmarks, and I saw only green to the sunrise side and green to the sunset side, green to the forest side and green to the river side, and far off, on the rise, Crab and Aesu on their horses, powerless to help me.

My mother had always told me that if all else failed, I should call out to the gods and they would come to my aid. But herein lay my weakness, the only flaw in what had been, otherwise, a swift and auspicious ascent to the position of druid: I had never been able to hear the gods speak. My mother had taken me to all the holy places within a day’s ride of our village—not just the moss, but also the stand of pines, the bend in the river where the stags drank, and the meadow deep in no-man’s-land where the ancients had placed the sunset stones. Each was beautiful in its own way, and each time I felt a lifting of the heart as I set foot on the very spot where my fellow druids had walked since the beginning of time and would walk until its end. And yet I soon realized this feeling was not what my mother meant when she spoke of the sublime and ineffable voices of the gods. Next she had given me mugwort to drink, and a tea made from black flowers, but the former made me vomit and the latter made me shiver, terrified, against the far wall of my mother’s house for a full day and night, scratching at the spiders I believed were crawling on my skin.

In the end my mother simply advised me to keep practicing, and said that the gods would reveal themselves to me once I learned to pay the proper quality of attention. I did practice, walking to the edge of the moss in the early morning and standing very still, listening as carefully as I could. It unnerved me to hear only the sounds of the birds and animals, the wind in the reeds—the time of the solstice festival was approaching, and I would need to drink the sacred draught before all my assembled neighbors, and speak to them in the gods’ voice. Still, concerned as I was, I had also been consumed by the many other duties of my new position, most of which I found more pleasant and less frustrating. Only now did I wish I had spent more time listening on those mornings, before I turned my back on the moss.

Marooned as I was, I tried to attend to the elements as my mother had shown me, but each seemed more oppressive and threatening than the one before. The air was thick with bugsong. The water sent up a fetid stench. The earth slipped sickeningly beneath my feet, as if at any moment I might plunge back into its sticky mouth. The sun blazed in the sky above me, burning the back of my neck and the part in my hair. Only the moss itself seemed benign, its colors more various up close than they had been from far away, pale and deep, gilded and silvered.

Indeed, as I bent low to the ground I could see that the tiny feathered fronds formed a kind of pattern, a lane of vibrant green bounded on each side by a duller tone, like vegetables left in the pot to stew. With a crooked stick I poked the green in its brightest heart, and it gave way: water underneath. I laughed to myself. I looked up at Crab and Aesu on the rise and gave them a wave of the hand.

Stepping only on the dullest patches, I made my way back to the last landmark I remembered, the pine stump that had been split by lightning in my great-great-grandfather’s time. From there the going was easy: Guided by the moss beneath me, I made no more false steps, and soon arrived at the semicircle of bulrushes that marks the offering place, my left leg drying in the sun.

Vasso the assistant smith had prepared the offering, and as usual he had been excessive, wrapping everything in three layers of heavy wool and including four figurines he had carved from hardwood—three women and what appeared to be a goat. He was ambitious and hoped to impress me, the head smith, and perhaps the gods themselves with this display of piety, but my mother had always told me that the gods only want what is valuable. I put the figures back in my satchel for the village children, and I removed from its scabbard the real substance of the offering: a broadsword, stout and well-balanced, its pommel stamped with the symbol of our village. Vasso could be annoying but his workmanship was good; I tested the sword against the bulrushes as my mother had taught me, and the sharp blade cut them swift and clean.

I chanted the sacred words, both in my language and in my mother’s native tongue. I presented the sword to the sunrise and sunset directions, as well as to the direction of the wide water in honor of my mother’s local gods. Then I made my requests: for safety on the road, a successful visit with the king, and—some believed we should be modest in what we asked of the gods, but I knew nothing was ever gained from half measures—an alliance that would yield prosperity and renown for our village. I measured the exact spot with the span of my hands, and then I laid the sword atop the moss and watched it slip beneath the surface to join its ancestors.

I admit I thought I would feel something this time, some holiness, especially after my earlier trial, but all I found in my mind and heart was the satisfaction of a task completed. Disconcerted, I began to make my way back to the rise, and I had reached the edge where the moss dries away to grass when I realized I had forgotten part of the offering ceremony—the appeal on behalf of the dead.

Our village had not buried someone in the moss since before I was born, a man named Inam who purported to be a mystic, but who was regarded by most of his neighbors as simply insane. He fell or jumped from an oak tree onto the forest road and cracked his skull open in the back and died there, looking up at the branches and the sky. No one knew if his was a holy death—a sacrifice of his body and spirit to the gods according to their direction—or if Inam had merely slipped from the oak in the midst of his ravings, and so he was interred in one of the burial pools that ring the moss, which are reserved for the unsettled dead.

The exact site of Inam’s burial was not marked in any way, and so I cast my gaze broadly over the whole of the moss as I made the appeal: peace for Inam’s family and for all the families of the moss-buried dead, and justice for them and for anyone with a hand in their deaths, if not today, then in the gods’ time. I did not expect a response to this request, which had always seemed vague and abstract to me—what use was justice in the gods’ time if I was not around to see it?—and I did not receive one.

I returned to the rise with my dress soaked in sweat, my shoes covered in mud, and midge bites swelling hot and itchy at the corner of each eye. Nonetheless I smiled widely at my brother and my friend, and hailed them in a loud voice, shouting that the offering had been a success and the gods had conferred great favor on our journey.