Gathering my cloak around me, I peered over my shoulder one last time. The solitary oak had become a grove and I understood that it was for me to enter there. I stood for a moment, hesitant, fearful. The way back led through the grove; there was none other. I understood… still, I hesitated.
'Great Light,' I said at last, 'go before me into this dark place. Be my Saviour and my Guide through all things, whatever shall befall me. And if it please you, Lord, oversee my safe return. I place myself under the protection of your Swift Sure Hand, and entreat you to surround me with Heaven's Champions. Though I go into the pit, there let me find you. Though I ascend the heights of moon and stars, there let me find you. Where I go, I go in faith, knowing that wherever I am, there will you be also; I in you, and you in me. In life, in death, in the life beyond, Great Light, uphold me. I am yours.'
So saying, I entered the grove.
The path lay silent, the air heavy and redolent of the tomb. No kindly ray illumined my passage. It was as if I walked in the shadowlands, alive yet cut off from the realm of the living. The trees – their thick, gnarled trunks black with age and scarred by the gnawing ravages of time-seemed stout pillars holding aloft a canopy so green and dark that it formed a shroud over me. I walked steadily, but no eye marked my passing, no sound of footfall attended my steps.
I had entered a sanctum, a holy remove from the wider world, a nemeton. What is more, moving among the trees I felt a strange familiarity. With a shiver of recognition, I realized where I was: Bryn Celli Ddu, the sacred grove on the Holy Island. Hafgan, dear, blessed Hafgan, had told me about it when I was a boy.
Within this secluded remove, I sensed the spirits of the Druidkind still lingering in the dense and dusky silence. Old beyond reckoning, the trees were ancient when Rome was still a muddy cattle pen. They had witnessed the ascent and decline of princes, kings, and empires; they had witnessed the slow ebb and flow of the years and seen Fortune's Wheel revolve in its ceaseless turning. These trees had watched over the Island of the Mighty since the first days, when the dew of Creation was still fresh on the ground. Brutus of Troy, Alexander, Cleopatra, and great Constantius had come and gone beneath their steady and unyielding gaze. The Learned Ones had held discourse under their twisting branches, and many yet slept in the bare earth beneath them.
Hafgan had told me, too, about that terrible day long ago when the Legions of Rome attacked the grove on the Holy Island. The Bards of Britain were felled like trees, hacked to death by Roman swords without protection of armour or weapons. For all its genius, the Roman military mind failed to recognize that the grove, not the Learned Brotherhood, was their true enemy. Had they burned it down or uprooted the trees, they would have triumphed that day, for they would have cut the Bardic Fellowship to its heart.
Relentless realists, men of practical habits and cool logic, the Romans never imagined that the trees, the symbol of the druid, must be conquered. The canny druids knew that flesh is weak, it lives out its span, dies and is no more. They sacrificed the perishable to the imperishable. The dying served the everliving, and thereby gained the eternal. The hardheaded Roman generals, watching the slaughter with cold eyes, never guessed it was their own downfall they beheld. For every drop of druid blood secured a future victory, and every druid death a triumph.
The Romans are gone now, but the Learned Brotherhood lives on. Many, very many, have realized the end of Truth's quest in the Cross of Jesu. The Wise Ones of the Oak have become the Brotherhood of Christ. The power of the holy grove is now the provenance of the Holy Church. The Great Light moves how he will. So be it!
In a little while, my steps led me to the mound I knew I would find in the centre of the grove: a round hump of stone covered by earth and turf, its entrance barely visible in the gloom. It was a tomb – both actual and symbolic, for as everyone knows actual symbols are always the most potent. Actual, for the dead were truly buried within. But symbolic, too; for here among the bones of the illustrious dead of elder days, the Seeker could lie down in figurative death that his living bones might commune with the age-brittle remains of his fathers.
Now it was my turn; I was the Seeker.
Stepping to the mound entrance, I raised my face to the sky but could see nothing through the dense thatch of interwoven branches save a dull golden glow. The boles of the mighty yews showed iron-black against the uncanny gloaming. It was the time-between-times and I could already feel my feet on the path. Raising my hands to either side of my head, I cried out in supplication:
In every stream, headland, ridge, and moor;
Traversing glens, traversing forests,
traversing valleys long and wild,
Fairest Jesu be upholding me,
Christ triumphant be my shield!
Great King of Mercy be my peace:
In every pass, on every hill,
In every stream, headland, ridge, and moor;
Each lying down, each rising up,
Whether in this world or some other.
Thus emboldened, I bent my head and stepped into the mound. Once inside, I was able to stand; I did so and walked farther into the mound, passing stone chambers on either side. I came to another threshold, crossed it, and continued. More chambers, some still bearing the bones of the ancient dead. I came to a third threshold and crossed it, entering yet another chamber – round as a womb and almost as dark. My shadow shattered and danced on the walls around me, quickened by a strange, flickering light behind me.
The walls of this chamber had been limed with white and painted with blue designs: the spiral and sundisc, the Mor Cylch and Cernunnos' horn. But the white had flaked away and the blue was little more than a stain on the rock. There were bones piled neatly against one walclass="underline" skulls round and white as river stones, thin curved ribs, arms and thighs.
I considered the impermanence of all things flesh, and the timeless moment that is eternity. I pondered the Eagle of Time sharpening his beak upon the granite mountain of this worlds-realm: when the stone mountain has been worn away to a single grain of sand, the eagle will fly away to the eyrie whence he came.
I meditated on these things as I stooped and stretched my hand towards a slender shinbone. All at once the ground beneath my feet gave way – as if a pit had suddenly opened under me. The chamber where I stood was hollow and the floor, weakened over time, could not hold my weight. I plummeted down into the blackness of Annum; the Underworld realm had swallowed and claimed me.
I spun into the abyss.
Darkness, blacker than the cold embrace of death, swarmed over me. The world of light and life vanished somewhere far above, extinguished like a rushlight in a gale. I cast aside all hope and clung to my failing senses as a man hurled into the teeth of the storm.
I fell, tumbling, turning, dropping down and down and down past roots and rocks, past springs and pools and underground streams. Far, far below, I heard the clash and clatter of water breaking on rock in a vast hidden cataract. Falling swift and straight, I struck the dark water and struggled to swim, to rise, but my clothes were heavy and my limbs exhausted. I plunged beneath the surface and sank without hope into my cold deepwater grave.
In a rictus tight as rock, my body was seized and borne along by swift currents. Over naked spires and crevices yawning wide in unending night, over a landscape barren as it was bleak, I flew. Far beneath the roots of the world, I drifted, deeper than the deepest whale, deep in Afanc's realm I soared in a slow, undulating flight.