Druids by Morgan Llywelyn Page B

part of his upper arm, and a sword had laid one cheek open from eyebrow to jaw. Using the wounds as an excuse, I went to find Sulis to ask her to care for the Bull personally. I watched as she poulticed his arm with herbs, then stripped a sheep’s kidney of its membrane, which she dipped in milk and spread very carefully over the gaping wound on the warrior’s cheekbone. Recalling the touch of her fingers, I envied Tarvos his injuries.
    When she dismissed us I took him back to the lodge with me to give him some wine and plunder his memories.
    He sat with his back against the wall, exploring the drying membrane on his cheek with tentative fingers. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said unbelievingly.
    “You were talking about the battle… .”
    “Ah. Noise. Noise is what I remember most. It’s always that way in a war, Ainvar. Yelling, swearing, screaming, grunting, bashing, clanging, one terrible roar that goes on and on until you think it will split the stones. I did what I always do. I ran into the middle of the noise and tried to make a louder noise.”
    “Why?”
    He shrugged the shoulder above the uninjured aim. “We all do it, that’s all. It gets you through. As long as you’re running and yelling you don’t have time to think, and you believe you’re going to be all right.” He drew a deep breath and winced as some new soreness surfaced. “While the battle is going on noise is the center of it and everything else is off at the edges.”
    I pondered this after he left the lodge. Later, at the celebration feast, I told Menua what Tarvos had said. Menua did not seem as surprised as I had been. “Noise is sound and sound is structure and structure is pattern,” he told me.
    “The harmony that holds the stars on their courses and the flesh on our bones resonates through all creation. Every sound contains its echo. Before there was Man, or even forest, there was sound. Sound spread from the Source in great circles like those
    formed when a stone is dropped into a pool.
    “We follow waves of sound from life to life. A dying man’s ears still hear long after his eyes are blind. He hears the sound that leads him to his next life as the Source of All Being plucks the harp of creation.”
    56 Morgan Llywelyn
    As so often before, I marveled at the scope of the chief druid’s knowledge. A thousand years of observation and study and contemplation, stored in one head …
    Our warriors had taken prisoners. Some thirty of the Senones were brought to our fort with halters around their necks. We greeted them with the contempt they deserved for having let themselves be captured rather than dying heroically in batde.
    As prisoners of war they were turned over to the druids. When Nantorus formally delivered them to Menua, he had one request to make. “Before I go on to Cenabum I want to question one of these men. He is said to be a runaway Aeduan who has been fighting as a mercenary for one of the princes of the Senones.”
    “A runaway from his own tribe?”
    “He committed some crime and feared the punishment of the druids, it seems. But that’s not why I want to question him. I’m more interested in rumors I Ve been hearing of the increasingly close relationship between Rome and the Aeduans. There are reports of Roman soldiers serving with Aeduan warriors. If that is true, I want to know, and I am hopeful this disaffected Aeduan can tell us.”
    “I’ll question him with you,” Menua said. “I am doubly interested in his story.”
    No one had invited me to go along, but I had learned that if I looked as if I knew what I was doing, I was rarely challenged. So I trotted in Menua’s shadow as he and the king went to the pens where the prisoners were being held under guard. The man they sought was soon identified by his companions and taken to a low, dark shed for questioning.
    The space was small and stank of woolen dyes. The guard pushed the man inside and then stepped back so Nantorus and Menua could enter. I