Read Online The Forest House by Marion Zimmer Bradley - Free Book Online Page A

sacrificed men to the Goddess in return for victory. They had all been so young in those days, so sure they could bring back the days of glory with a little courage and a sharp sword.
    "If there’s any disturbance,” said Ardanos, "any demonstration even, you know as well as I do that this part of the country will be cut to pieces. But how could I know their Legions had just marched through and levied thirty good men to rot in those filthy Mendip mines?”
    But he should have known; he was supposed to know what the Romans were up to almost before they knew it themselves. He had to be ready for the next outrage, whatever it might be.
    She said, "Canceling the rites at this late date would probably create unrest even where there was none. Do you want me to try it? Have there been any incidents, reaction to the levies, perhaps?”
    "I’m not sure,” Ardanos said. "Someone seems to have tried to arrange for the Prefect’s son to…disappear—”
    "The Prefect’s son?” Lhiannon raised one thin eyebrow as if wondering why anyone should care. "To protest, or to make trouble for our people? Wouldn’t it be more like Bendeigid to murder the men who came to take away the levies?”
    "He found the lad trapped in a boar pit and saved his life, and now the boy is a guest in his home.”
    Lhiannon stared at him for a moment and began to laugh. "And your son-in-law Bendeigid does not know?”
    "The lad looks enough like his Silure mother to pass for one of ours, and he’s self-possessed enough not to give himself away. But he’ll need to do some healing before he can be moved. If anything happens to the youngster, who’s never, as far as I know, done anything much either good or ill, you know as well as I do that we’ll be blamed for it. We get blamed for everything else, all the way back to and including the sack of Troy, and the very fact that the Legions are here and not back in Gaul where they belong. There are all the old atrocity stories that go back to the deified Julius—may he rest in peace,” Ardanos added with a fierce grin that meant, she was certain, the exact opposite.
    "Still, there is an element of rebellion,” he said. "You don’t see it, placed as you are; I don’t see it much, living among Romans as I’ve done for so long. But it’s my business to watch the winds. To see signs and omens. For instance—where ravens fly at midnight; I speak of the secret society that worships the Lady of Battles.”
    This made her laugh. "Oh, Ardanos! Those half-crazy old men who sacrifice to Cathubodva, telling fortunes and looking for omens in dead birds’ guts—as bad as the Legions with their sacred chicken-coops—no one has ever paid the slightest attention to them—”
    "That’s what they were,” Ardanos said. He told himself that he welcomed being able to tell Lhiannon something she did not know. In the old days, the priestesses had been equal with the Druids in their councils, but since the fall of Mona they had learned to be secret in order to survive. On occasion, the Arch-Druid even had to act on his own. Ardanos wondered sometimes if they might not be carrying it too far—if the priestesses might carry out the decisions of the Council better if they had a voice in making them. Then he would not have felt so alone with the problem.
    "That is surely what they were, not three years ago. Now suddenly, instead of old priests and sacrificers, they’re a group of young men, not one of whom is over twenty-one and most of whom were born in the Holy Island, who think they are reincarnations of the Sacred Band—”
    " Those children! Born as they were, it would not surprise me.” Her smooth brow wrinkled as she began to understand.
    "Exactly so,” he continued. "That boy Cynric whom Bendeigid is fostering is one of them, and my son-in-law, who always did have a touch of the fanatic,