Free The Greener Shore by Morgan Llywelyn Page B

broken bones….
    “What do you expect me to do about it?” I asked reasonably.
    “I don’t know, you are the chief druid.”
    She said “are” instead of “were,” although she knew better. Apart from myself she was the only one who did. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue. “Planting crops is women’s work,” I reminded her. “Men only plow the fields, and a chief druid does not even do that.”
    “Then what good are you?”
    Briga said it with a laugh, but I wished she had not asked me that question.
    We would not go hungry. Grannus and young Glas kept us supplied with game. The river teemed with fish unfamiliar with the craftiness of man; laughably easy to catch. There also were edible roots and herbs, wild soft fruits, and delicious mushrooms. Yet we would have no more bread made from the sort of wheat I had eaten all my life. I never appreciated it until I knew I would not taste it again. At night I began dreaming of crusty loaves hot from a stone oven.
    We wanted more than subsistence, however. We longed for what we had possessed in Gaul: our culture, our way of life. I began thinking of ways to restore a semblance of it to my little band. One way was through art; the art of the craftsman.
    Perhaps I had been hasty in refusing to offer a prayer of thanksgiving to the Two-Faced One. Without him we would not be alive today. Perhaps, my head suggested, I should ask the Goban Saor to carve another when he had more time.
    One of his first tasks was to make a churn for Briga. He was using only wood from the oaks. “Wise wood makes wise butter,” my grandmother used to say.
    As we re-created our community, many of those old sayings came back to me; came back to all of us. We think we build new lives for ourselves but we build on old foundations.
    My senior wife was very particular about her butter. Churning was never done during the dark of the moon. The milk must be no more nor less than three days old. Cream was carefully skimmed from the top of the milk with a wooden spoon, poured into a cool stone bowl, then covered with a strip of clean linen to allow it to ripen. The result was a butter so delicious it could be eaten by itself. The children were fond of scooping a treat out of the churn when no one was looking.
    So was I.
    Halfway up the valley stood a solitary dead tree. Bees had colonized the rotten cavity, but whenever we tried to gather their honey the creatures went wild. Both Grannus and Damona were badly stung. Then one day my small daughter Gobnat walked up to the tree and casually thrust her arm into the cavity. Briga gave a shriek of alarm, but her fear was ill-founded. The bees were charmed by Gobnat. They would let her take a handful of honeycomb dripping with golden sweetness whenever she liked. We put honey onto almost everything until the novelty wore off. My clan was delighted.
    I had another reason to rejoice: The druid gift had appeared anew.
    Not everything was lost after all.
    As the wheel of the seasons turned, we surveyed our handiwork with pride. Our roofs were snugly thatched with reeds from the stream. Firewood was stacked against the north wall of the lodges to break the wind. We had sufficient butter and soft cheese and salted meat to see us through the winter. For anything else we must apply to Cohern. That too had been part of our agreement.
    As the autumn evenings drew in upon us, and in the darkness before dawn when only druids are awake, I brooded on our situation. We had a place to live but no real freedom. Cohern was adamant that we not wander beyond our allotted space. “That’s all your clan’s entitled to, Ainvar. If they stray outside its boundaries anything could happen.”
    “Would one of the other tribes attack us?”
    “
Anyone
might attack you,” Cohern had replied.
    So here we were. Penned in by mountains, with no view of the far horizon. Penned in. Penned in.
    I regretted having agreed so readily. A druid with a wise head would have made a better deal. But