CHAPTER II
HUMANS
I wasn't so confident once I'd reached Pentref. Passing within the rickety wooden palisade that surrounded the village, I shuddered to feel it psychically and physically cut me off from the forest.
Don't be a fool. If Mother can endure this, so can you.
With that, I started boldly forward, only to stop in confusion, facing what to me was a vast confusion of houses, squat, graceless things with smoke-darkened thatching and thick, wattle-and-daub walls set seemingly at random around a central, grassless square. All of them looked exactly alike to me. Which was the home of Elin-the-baker? I took a tentative sniff, hoping for the aroma of baking bread, and coughed. Looking back, I suspect Pentref's smell wasn't all that unpleasant, but used as I was to the clean forest air, the combination of close-packed humanity, refuse, and y Duwies knew what else was enough to make me choke.
There was a well in the square, and people around it. I decided to ask them which was Elin-the-baker's home and get this over with as soon as I could.
But my confident strides slowed as I saw all those heads turn to stare at me. These were mostly young people, boys and girls together, a few years older than myself, snatching a few moments from their daily chores to chat and flirt. But I was unnerved by the open hostility to me that I read in the boys' eyes.
"Good day to you," I said carefully in Cymraeth. "Can anyone tell me which is the house of Elin-the-baker?"
One rawboned, fair-haired youngster took a swaggering step forward. "Who is it wants to know?"
He was speaking the clipped, curt language of the east. Later, I came to realize the young folk saw Anglic as more fashionable than Cymraeth because it was new and foreign—but spoke it primarily because (being, after all, like younglings the world over) it annoyed their elders.
Just then, I was simply grateful to my mother for insisting I learn both languages.
But why was this boy so rude? My tunic and cloak were of good weave, taken as trade goods by my mother from a weaver in exchange for her having magically strengthened the poles of a loom for him, and if I was barefoot, why, so were they all. "My name is not your concern," I said shortly in Anglic. "Just tell me which house belongs to Elin-the-baker and I'll not disturb you further."
A second boy moved lazily forward to join the first. "Maybe Elin-the-baker doesn't want to be bothered. Not by one like you."
Light dawned. These were all stocky, powerfully built youngsters, fair of hair and skin, while I was tall for my age, and slender, black of hair and eye: alien. "Duwies glân, do you think me something out of the Hollow Hills? I'm here to help the woman, not harm her!"
"Are you, now?"
There was an unspoken threat behind the simple words. The boy who had first spoken took another step forward, crowding me, trying to force me to move back, studying me through half-lidded, contemptuous eyes. Alarmed Power stirred in me, swirling hotly through my veins. I could make this idiot cringe! I could make him kneel in the dirt and wet himself in fear—
As I'd done with the stag.
No!
"Look you," I said, struggling for calm, "I'm Aidan ap Nia, son of the . . . ah . . . witch-woman."
Someone drew in his breath in a sharp hiss of alarm, and I saw several hands steal surreptitiously to hidden amulets. I saw something else: some of the girls, lingering warily by the wall, were giving me quick, hot, intrigued glances, speculative glances that disturbed me even though I was just a little too young yet to fully interpret them. The boys were old enough, though, and not too pleased at what they must have seen as a betrayal. But before anyone could say anything, one of the girls pushed her way boldly through the crowd to my side.
"Wanted Elin-the-baker's house did you? I'm going that way. Come on."
I was busy staring at her, taking in the broad, cheerful, blue-eyed face (those blue eyes so strange to me, so exotic), the healthy, warmly curved figure. I felt my face begin to redden at the sight of those curves, felt the first bewildering flickerings of an inner fire that had nothing to do with Power, at least not magical Power. I glanced hastily up again in confusion, still too young, as I've said, to quite understand all that was being offered to me and managed to stammer out:
"Thank you. That—that would be very kind."
She reached out and took my arm; the touch seemed to burn right through the good wool sleeve of my tunic. As we walked away from the well, I heard one of the boys mutter, not quite under his breath, "Fatherless witch-boy."
Fatherless. That wasn't quite the epithet you might think it. Granted, you may be puzzling that I haven't mentioned my father again—or rather, my wondering about the apparent lack of one. Well, of course I wondered, and of course I wove romantic stories for myself of whom he might be, making him now hero, now minstrel, now enchanted wanderer. But after that one mention of him having been a good man but no magician, my mother had never spoken of him again, and I—why, I never asked her.
Does that surprise you? Ah, but you must remember I am of Cymra, where the old ways still linger, and where a woman need not bind herself to a husband. If it was sufficient to my mother that she had found a man fair enough to want to create a child with him, that was her right. And if she then hadn't wished to cleave to him— why, that was her right, too, and no shame or strangeness about it, or reason for me to want a father's name to add to my own.
But I certainly wasn't thinking of my father just then, not with my buxom escort leaning on my arm and giving me quick, sly glances. Her name, I learned, was Nona, and I suspect that she couldn't have been much more than fifteen, ripe for marriage. Or mischief.
"Here we are, Aidan."
"Uh . . . thank you."
"Is that all?" She moved closer to me, so close that I could smell the healthy young female scent of her. "Don't you want anything else of me?"
"No, I—I don't think so."
She hesitated, then backed off with a reluctant sigh. "No. I can see you don't." Nona shrugged. "Come back to see me again, Aidan ap Nia. When you're a little older."
Heart racing, I bowed my politest bow, and hurried into the house of Elin-the-baker.
She turned out to be a chubby, middle-aged woman limping about spryly enough with the aid of a forked stick crutch. "Eh, you're not the witch-woman. Her son, though, with that black hair and those eyes."
"Ah. Yes. Aidan ap Nia, at your service, ma'am. She sent me in her place."
Elin-the-baker was a polite woman. She must have been doubtful about letting a raw boy treat her, but she never uttered a word of complaint. Even so, I felt awkward as any farmboy at first.
But as soon as I saw the half-healed, ugly burn and gingerly reached out to touch the skin around it, I forgot my unease and her skepticism, aware only of the feel of wrongness that was damaged flesh like a shiver of pain along my own nerves. For the first time I understood why my mother, otherwise such a private, solitary soul, was driven out of her way to heal: it wasn't from any Anglic sense of saintly goodness, but out of sheer discomfort.
Doggedly I began to murmur the intricate words of healing my mother had taught me. But my Power stirred within me of its own accord, rising up and up like waves of ever brightening flame. And I couldn't deny it. Nothing else was real. There was only the magic quivering through my fingertips to the wound, there was only the indescribable sensation, not pain, not pleasure, as delicate layer by layer the burned skin sloughed aside at my will and fresh, healthy flesh grew and joined to take its place. Intoxicated by the wonder of what was happening, I fed more and more strength into the healing. . . .
All at once it was done. The burn was healed. And I was toppling over sideways into exhausted slumber.
I woke, weak as a new fawn, back in my mother's hut. As I looked up at her in confusion, she smiled slightly.
"Yes. You're home. I brought you here myself, after what I'd seen in my scrying pool."
I stretched tired muscles, too worn to be angry that she'd spied on me, and blinked at the light filtering into the hut. "Morning? I slept the day around?"
"Aidan, love, you've been asleep for nearly two days! Not surprisingly," she added with a touch of wry humor. "I did warn you about drawing out too much inner strength, didn't I?"
"Sorry . . ."
"I'm not scolding you. Far from it." Nia shook her head in amazement. "The healing you worked . . . I never taught you that. How did you know what to do?"
"I—I don't know. It just . . . felt right." I stared up at her in alarm. "I didn't do anything wrong, did I?"
"Not at all." My mother hesitated, as though trying to decide whether or not I was up to a lesson, then added gently, "Of course, if you're to be a successful healer, you do need to learn something about priorities."
She sighed at my blank look. "Why do you think I hadn't worked my own magics on the woman? First, the burn, ugly though it might have looked to you, wasn't much worse than a scorching from too much sun. It wasn't even paining her any longer. Second, it was well along the way to healing. One more application of the salve, and I doubt there would even have been a scar."
"Oh."
"You see? You didn't need to squander your strength like that. A good many wounds and illnesses heal very nicely with nothing more than rest, cleanliness, and the proper medication. That's a fortunate thing, believe me!" she added with a laugh. "It's much less wearing on the healer!"
"I guess so."
"Hey now, don't sulk. I didn't mean to insult you." Before I could turn away, she reached out to ruffle my hair. "You acted out of a good heart, and that's the most important thing." Her eyes were thoughtful. "And I'm still impressed by your skill. You do seem to be developing your own unique Power."
That idea was both exciting and a little frightening. Seeing the unease that must surely have shown on my face, my mother grinned at me.
"Och fi," she murmured, which is our Cymraeth way of expressing a whole world of meaning—everything from "alas" to "oh my"—in only two words. "All in all, your trip to Pentref didn't work out exactly the way either of us had planned."
I thought of the hostile youngsters, and the bewilder-ingly friendly Nona, and the healing I'd worked. "No," I agreed. "I guess it didn't."
So the seasons passed. I was sixteen, and finding a new restlessness within me. Understanding, my mother helped me build my own hut so we'd both have our privacy.
Not that I was home very often. No, that restlessness made me wander far afield, seeking in wood and down I didn't know what, dreaming dreams without names, comfortable only with my Power, vaguely discontent with all else though I didn't know why.
Nona, I thought, remembering sly blue eyes, the promise of that warmly curved body—a promise I was now old enough to understand. I wasn't quite an innocent by that point: there were forest sprites delighted to counterfeit a woman's form and tarry with the young magician. But they were light and soulless as mist, forgetting me between one moment and the next, leaving me with an aching loneliness they couldn't understand.
But Nona was human.
In my restlessness, I set out for Pentref once more.
I arrived on a night of celebration, not one of the four Great Solstices but one of the lesser, when everyone in the village was out in the fields, feasting about a blazing bonfire, enjoying mead and song. It was a warm night, heavy with the intoxicating scents of forest in late summer, rich, almost overripe yet with that first faint, sharp undertone that hinted of the coming autumn.
At first no one noticed me. But it wasn't long before the young men of the village, my less-than-friends of my last visit, now nearly fully grown, realized I was wandering among them.
"What're you doing here, witch-boy?"
"You're not welcome here, witch-boy."
They were ringing me round, full of the courage that comes with mead and companionship. But I had come a long way in just the few years since my last visit, and now I could see with a magician's clear sight, looking past the facade of bravado to the fear of the unknown quivering in their minds.
Puppies, I thought, for all that they were a few years my senior, just puppies trying to drag down a wolf. Be wary, pups. This wolf has fangs.
And I put just enough magical will into that thought to make them move out of my way, still muttering their brave words but no longer daring at all to back the words with anything stronger. I couldn't really be angry with them. They were only fools, and I was seeking something warmer than a fight—
"Nona."
She was plumper than I had remembered, and there was a coarseness to the cheerful face, but still . . . Nona stared at me blankly.
"Don't you remember me, Nona? I'm Aidan, Aidan ap Nia."
"The witch-boy!" Blue eyes looked me up and down. "Not quite a boy anymore."
"Eh, Nona!" called a man's laughing voice, and she grinned and yelled back, "Rein in your team, Tomos, I'm coming!"
"Nona, I—"
"Nice seeing you again, Aidan. Happy times to you."
"But—"
"That's my husband calling, love. Got to go."
Her husband. I should have realized.
With a sigh, I turned to leave. But now there were other girls gathering about me, drawn by the intrigue of magic. And if they weren't Nona, if they were plump and healthy rather than pretty, at least there was pleasure in learning they didn't find me at all fearsome or unattractive. For a time, being young, I enjoyed that night, enjoyed awing and delighting them with little tricks of mildest magic. Enjoyed, too, being human, the nervous hoverings of the young men in the shadows, desperately trying to pretend they didn't see me. Who knew? Maybe I would pick one of these cheerful, silly girls and praise y Duwies with her this night, as the country saying goes.
And yet . . .
I had magician's sight. I saw past their flirtings and found nothing save that childish awe, and behind it, shallowness. For them, joy was this: food and drink and couplings, warmth in the winter, the security of knowing life was and would forever remain the same. And I realized that for all our shared humanity, we were alien to each other, very alien indeed. At last, confused and lonely, I went my way, trying not to notice the young men swaggering forward to their girls, pretending that no, of course they hadn't been afraid.
Och, but they were glad to see me go.
So the slow days passed and I still found myself forlorn and frustrated, searching for the unknown.
And then, walking by myself one night beneath a radiant moon, I found the answer to my search.