House of Refuge, Chapter 8

8 Yarrow

The beginning of supper was agony for us all.

Space had been set aside for Arrowshot and Brightsong as my visitors, with Willowwind on Arrowshot’s other side as his beloved.  Brightsong refused to sit next to me and took his seat between the other two. Willowwind sat with his hand on Brightsong’s arm. Yellowwood had changed places with Starcourse. I saw misery in his eyes when he looked across to us from where he now sat. “If it could have gone worse, I don’t know how,” I told Arrowshot.

“You could have made it easier on him,” he said, turning towards me and lowering his voice. “He didn’t have to see the two of you carried completely away with each other. Witnessing a little mild affection between the two of you would have taught him the last of what he needed to understand before tonight.” I knew his frustration wasn’t only for Brightsong’s sake. His own Full Moon, and his one day of reunion with Willowwind before heading back down country, were all but certainly ruined.

“We never meant it to go so far,” I said. “It just happened, when you’d barely taken him to Willowwind. And then we lost track of time.”

“Couldn’t the two of you have just given it a rest, for his first Full Moon?” he pressed on. “The lad’s heart was so open. He’s longed for you so desperately.”

He held it in for a moment and then let the rage flow. “It’s times like this I understand why our father came back down country.”

“That’s not fair,” I shot back. “We made a mistake. We never intended to hurt him.

“And maybe you’re forgetting how hard it is for all of us to set aside what our whole life down country led us to expect life would be like here,” I added.

“No,” he said, and turned to see Willowwind still talking to Brightsong, cradling my nephew-down-country’s hand in his. “I think that’s what you’re forgetting. Maybe what everyone who lives up here has forgotten. He saw your tenderness with Yellowwood when we first arrived. He already understood we’ll all be together under the Tree tonight. Isn’t that enough? How much do you expect a newcomer to take in on his first afternoon?”

“Enough that our life here isn’t held hostage to the jealousies men from down below think they’re entitled to when they arrive,” I retorted. “Men coming up here trying to lay claim to one another almost tore Refuge apart before we began showing them our life from the outset. Ask Firesong. He still remembers what it was like when he was young. ’Twice-begotten and twice-born in Cernunnos’: birth isn’t easy, Arrowshot. If it were, the Staghorn Lord himself might never have come up country. A House of Refuge wouldn’t exist at all.

“We’re not one another’s husbands. We’re not one another’s wives. He has to understand that from the beginning.” I wasn’t happy for the severity in my own voice. Perhaps it flowed, at least a little, from what was left of my own regrets in my first days coming here, for what I hoped to find and didn’t--before what I found instead came to seem even richer. And prayed Brightsong was too absorbed with Willowwind to overhear. How could I long for him so deeply, even as I knew that being united with him meant letting him go as well?

I didn’t expect tears streaming down my cheeks. Nor my brother-down-country turning to cradle my face in his hands. Mercifully, there was enough conversation humming in the hall to make them less conspicuous. Others near us looked decorously away, turning to their own talk. Save for Brightsong and Willowwind.

The lad’s eyes melted and welled up as well. He reached across Arrowshot to take my hand. Arrowshot almost immediately moved his stool back from the table, stood up, and laid a hand on his shoulder,  encouraging him to switch places.

“This isn’t the reunion either one of us hoped for,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Brightsong broke in, and then sobbed, “I just want to be with you. I can’t stand not being with you.”

Yellowwood has told us both that for the rest of supper we looked more like two sixteen-year-olds rutting for each other than a newcomer talking with a man who’d taken Refuge years earlier. I felt more like a sixteen-year-old. My need for him was as strong for him as his for me. Perhaps not as desperate, for my time here. Even so, years of my own desire, mounting ever higher but ever more pent-up as he’d ripened toward manhood, poured out between us in that short space before the end of the meal. We were the last ones to leave the tables when everyone else had withdrawn to the far side of the hall in conversation with a draft of mead and a brazier on which some hemp seeds already smoked to help ease us all out of our small selves and into the Soul of Cernunnos.

I can’t say how much he really understood by the time Full Moon began. It’s one thing to grasp such things with the mind, another to feel them them in the heart, the belly, the loins. It was pointless telling him that my love for Yellowwood could never replace what he meant to me, that it wasn’t a contest for anyone to win or lose. That, and all such truths, can only be lived into. I could only offer a prayer of thanks to the Staghorn Lord that he’d brought my beloved here, and a prayer that His healing power would open his heart to the infinity of love of which we’re capable. If not under the Tree that night, then in the fullness of time.

As we walked down the length of the hall, he released my hand and walked directly up to Yellowwood to lay a hand on his heart. I could see that he’d startled himself no less than Yellowwood. They both stood awkwardly for what felt like a much longer time than it could have been--and then began laughing. Arrowshot saw it, with initial alarm at the thought of what his son-down-country might have intended, approaching the man he saw as a rival, and then with relief.

A little later, the mead and the burning hemp seeds began having their effect on us as they’d already done on the men who’d withdrawn from supper before us. Welling up within me I felt my longing to go the Tree--a desire I saw sweetly mirrored in the gestures of men toward one another all around the hall. Brightsong, unaccustomed either to strong drink or the smoke, hung on my neck like a vine on an elm tree, but watched in fascination to see Arrowshot standing chest to chest with Willowwind, whispering together, their arms around one another’s necks. Yellowwood, bless his dear and generous heart, withdrew to the company of his other closest friends.

And then the moment when so often we move together like a flock of birds, all knowing when to turn as one toward their place of their rest, witness to the Soul of Cernunnos already blossoming within us. Without words, without the bell ringing to summon us, we all flowed from the hall, out along the walkway, around the side of the dormitory to the welcoming darkness of the Great Tree silhouetted by the rising moon.