Free The Greener Shore by Morgan Llywelyn Page A

steady example—I assigned Dara and Glas to Teyrnon as well.
    Once the lodge sites had been selected, the women drew a supply of water from the river and milked one of our new cows. Rather, they attempted to milk the cow. She was not cooperative.
    “Perhaps she’s too young,” I remarked to Grannus, who was sitting on a stone in the sun. Grannus was a great believer in sitting whenever possible. He claimed it conserved his strength. Perhaps it did. Grannus had neither druid gifts nor a warrior spirit, but he was the strongest oak in the forest, a man of immeasurable value in circumstances such as ours.
    “In my experience females take a lot of coaxing, Ainvar,” he said to me.
    “Are we talking about cattle, or women?”
    “Females,” Grannus replied succinctly.
    Sulis had long refused to marry anyone. As she once explained to me, “Carrying children in my body could interfere with my ability to heal others, because I would be concentrating on the life within myself.”
    If my Briga had been willing to join the Order of the Wise she could have demonstrated the fallacy of that belief.
    Grannus had waited until Sulis was past the age of childbearing, then pursued her as few women are ever pursued. Sober, serious Grannus had, for three full seasons, been charming and witty and endlessly attentive, and won himself a great prize.
    Our conversation was interrupted by Damona, who announced that the work had proceeded to the stage where male strength was required. No druid exemption was allowed. So after conducting a ritual to placate the spirit of the trees, we began cutting oak and spruce to build our lodges. Only the oldest trees were used, those nearing the end of their lives. Nothing young was harmed. New life is sacred.
    I enjoyed using my muscles instead of my head. The body is not as cruel as the mind.
    Our work did not end with woodcutting. While hiding in the forests of Gaul we had deluded ourselves into thinking the situation was temporary, and had made do with temporary expedients. But Hibernia was not temporary. We would be here for the rest of our lives and the lives of our children’s children, and our women wanted permanence. They provided us with an endless list of tasks. As long as there was light, we labored.
    Once or twice during those early days I glimpsed Cormiac Ru on the mountainside. He did not come near, but it was reassuring to know he was keeping an eye on us. On Briga.
    By the next change of the moon a lot of hard work had produced three sturdy timber lodges in the Gaulish style and a fenced enclosure for our livestock. We also built a roofed lean-to for Teyrnon, where he could set up a forge. Otherwise it might be difficult to keep the fire going. The Gaulish summer, which I recalled with a yearning heart, had been filled to the brim with sunlight. The Hibernian summer was cobwebbed with gentle rain.
    My senior wife came to me with a handful of grain. “I don’t think our wheat will sprout here, Ainvar.”
    “Why not? You can see for yourself how fertile the soil is. Vegetation is positively leaping out of the earth.”
    “Look up,” she replied.
    I looked up.
    “Now look in that direction.” Briga nodded toward the east. “And that.” She gestured to the west. “Do you see any sunshine?”
    “Not at this moment, no.” I had to defend our newfound home; I was re sponsible for bringing us here in the first place. “But the sun does shine, Briga. I’ve seen it break through the clouds twenty times in a single day, and when it does, the land sparkles.”
    “Oh yes,” she agreed, “the land sparkles, it’s beautifully green. But the sun is not hot enough for long enough. Our wheat won’t grow here.”
    “How can you be so sure?”
    Assuming a listening expression, she held her hands close to her face and poured a few heads of wheat from one hand to the other. “It tells me so,” she said.
    I knew better than to doubt her. All sorts of things talked to Briga: flowers, grain,