Twelve sacred trees, one for each month of the year.
They furnished everything from dyes to whistles via divining rods and brooms, they provided heat, shelter and food. Without these trees, the people of the forests could not survive. This was the universe without which they would die.
Yet the roots of the ash strangled those of its neighbours. The smoke from burning rowan was believed to summon demons. Willow had long been associated with the dark side of the moon.
Light and dark.
Good and evil.
The sacred and eternal balance.
Claudia glanced at the cliff, thinking of the slave village that lay hidden by trees on the hill. For all the silver birch's ability to self-propagate, this remained the one thing the Hundred-Handed could not do. For their line to continue they needed men. Men like Gabali, who were healthy, handsome, strong and intelligent, but who also possessed other qualities — a deep capacity for love, for instance. His treasured Andalus was one example, not to mention a daughter he'd been forbidden from seeing but which didn't stop him from wanting to protect her. In denying Gabali what came naturally to him, hot (but forbidden) love had mutated into cold (but remunerated) justice.
What of the other men who lived locked inside that palisade? How might their anger and suppression find an outlet?
Gabali wasn't unique. Like it or not, prime specimens had been sold into slavery since the dawn of time, but there had always been an order to their subjection. They'd married, raised kids, and even though those children had been born into slavery, family order had still been maintained. Stability was part of the deal. Admittedly, from time to time stories surfaced of sadists who beat their servants and sold them like cattle, but these, thank Jupiter, were the minority. An isolated few, who made the news for all the wrong reasons and simply because of their wrongdoings.
Brushing against banks of wild mint as she strolled by the river, Claudia's hems released clouds of its invigorating fragrance. The Hundred-Handed weren't cruel to their male captives in the physical sense — indeed, Beth would be outraged at the very suggestion. But their behaviour flew in the face of every convention as these 'prime specimens' were kept not only locked up, but under the control of women who used them for work and sex and then, when they'd outlived their usefulness in the eyes of the priestesses, sold them on like redundant cookpots. If that wasn't cruelty, Claudia didn't know what was, the only surprise was that more hadn't snapped. The question was, would that rage extend to taking it out on a twelve-year-old child?
Maybe this magnificent, chained and powerless male believed that, in killing a novice, it was the start to sparing future generations from becoming like him? That if the Hundred-Handed were eliminated — cut off at the root, as it were — the plant would wither and die?
If so, that put three little flaxen-haired beauties in the path of some very real danger.
'What happened to you, Clytie?' she whispered. 'Were you the victim of a sick, twisted mind who looked to an executed butcher as some kind of hero?'
Beth clearly thought so.
'Or is Dora right? Were you the tragic result of a warrior's trial run, or is my theory closer to the mark? That you were sacrificed on an altar of despairing male principles?'
Quite literally, given the shape of the rock, and maybe that in itself was important. But tempting as it was to seek logic in murder, Claudia's notion of putting an end to the sect by killing novices would only work if every priestess was beyond child-bearing age. Dora and several others certainly were, and although Beth, Fearn and Ailm were fast approaching that stage, there were still plenty of nubile Initiates on hand to do their duty. If Clytie's killer hoped to eradicate the Hundred-Handed, his object was self-defeating. The College would probably double in numbers overnight.
Watching a grass snake slither through the thyme, another theory began to take shape.
Orbilio had called the Hundred-Handed idealists, but idealists came in many forms. Suppose someone believed that by killing Clytie they were setting her little soul free? Once again, Claudia's eyes were drawn to the cave with two mouths. One for humans to pass through, decked with honeysuckle and rose. The other garlanded with yew that was reserved for the spirits, and which led straight down to the Underworld.
It's our holy obligation to learn Natures lore and store the knowledge inside our hearts, Vanessia had said.
It's our purpose for this reincarnation.
This reincarnation, that was the point. Suggesting the Hundred-Handed were not reborn into their own cult and thus begging the question, if not back here, where did their saintly souls go? As a flock of finches swooped down to drink from the shallows, she remembered Dora remarking that, in her view, the painting and arranging of Clytie's body was a clumsy attempt to imitate the previous murders.
Until now, Claudia had assumed the killer was male, but as both Gabali and the Oak Priestess had taken pains to point out, no sexual assault had taken place and was that what the Hundred-Handed were hiding? That they knew — or suspected — she'd been killed by a woman? One, in fact, of their own…?
I know, the note by her bedside had read and despite the heat of midsummer, Claudia shivered.
She couldn't see them. She couldn't hear them. But around the dark side of the cave, spirits hovered like bees.
Waiting to lead another soul down to be judged.
Nine
To be shunned was to be voted invisible, and once invisible the outcast was forbidden to speak, wash, even worship within his own community.
The length of expulsion was determined by a number of factors, though obviously it was influenced by the proportion of black pebbles over white in the voting jar. As a rule, the higher the number, the longer the exile and though a unanimous vote could result in a lifetime ban, such cases were rare. Shunning was intended as a deterrent. A hope that, by being forced to live on the edge of society for anything from a few weeks to a couple of years, with the penitent obliged to fend for himself and unable to communicate with friends and family — even drink water upstream from them for fear of polluting them with his guilt — he (and it was always a he) would return home humble, contrite, but most of all an example to others that rules were laid down for a reason.
Murder and rape were capital crimes, but there was no room in society for the likes of assault, theft or the sabotage of another man's crops, nor would extortion, slander, cowardice or arson be tolerated, either. For moving his neighbour's boundary stones, a farmer might expect to be shunned for three years, since he had callously planned to enrich his own life at the expense of another's and used deceit under the guise of friendship. However, falsely accusing one's sister-in-law of adultery might result in a couple of months, while stealing livestock or grain fell somewhere in between.
No one ever expected small communities to live in close proximity without flare-ups of temper and temperament, the Whisperer reflected. It was a question of weighing the damage.
If accusations of adultery went ignored, what level of malicious lies might then follow? If one man moved his boundary by five yards and wasn't punished, why not claim fifteen yards? Fifty? In the eyes of the tribes, shunning was simply a piece of legal machinery. When your harvester starts bending the corn instead of cutting it, don't you dismantle the box and sharpen the metal teeth back to points? It was the same with recalcitrant tribe members. Unscrew them from the community, clean them up and then, once they're in a fit state to resume their original purpose, connect them back up to the machine.
The young patriot barely heard the chatter of jays in the branches or the distant thwack of an axe. He heard only the words of the Chieftains inside his head, declaring him guilty of treason against his own tribe and sentencing him to a lifetime of shunning. Even now, he wondered they could face themselves, hypocritical bastards that they were.