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hair in my groin, my voice had deepened, my penis could stiffen like a stallion’s. What more, I wondered, was necessary for manhood?
    As my studies continued, spring blossomed with a radiance all
    26 Morgan Llywelyn
    the more welcome after such a bitter winter. Our sunseason songs were blended from the rustle of new leaves, the liquid outpourings of the nightingale, the drumming of the woodpecker. Beyond the gate of the fort we began building a tower of timber to feed the great bone-fire that would herald Beltaine. Beltaine, Festival of the Fire of Creation.
    From Menua I learned that the Source of All Being is the single and singular force of creation, yet has many faces. Mountain and forest and river, bird and bear and boar, each reveals a different mood of the Creator, a different aspect. Each is therefore a sym-bol of the one Source, but we reverence these nature gods separately with individual rites, showing that we understand and respect the diversity of creation.
    Every entity must be free to be itself.
    The sun is called the Fire of Creation and is the most powerful of symbols, because without light there is no life. Life is both Creator and creation, Menua explained; the closing of the sacred circle.
    For this reason we Celts made our temples the living groves.
    As the days grew longer, we carried the last gnawed bones of winter out of the fort to pile on the bone-fire, which would be a
    sacrificing of the old, a cleansing and a preparation for the new. It was an exciting time. Some mornings when I awoke I thought I would burst from my skin for sheer exuberance. Then I thought of Rosmerta, who would not see this spring… .
    I said nothing of this to Menua, but druids do not need words. One evening, when the twilight shadows were long and blue and my mroat closed up with melancholy, he took the net of dried borage down from the rafters. From the herb he prepared a drink sweetened with the last of the stored honey.
    “Drink this, Ainvar. Borage eases a sorrowful spirit. Your long face is not appropriate for the season, and soon we shall go out to the bone-fire and begin the singing.”
    I recalled Beltaines of other years, and Rosmerta’s cracked but enthusiastic voice, and her arm around my shoulders. In one long gulp I drained the cup.
    The beverage was musty tasting, but it cleared my head. By this simple magic my sadness was eased, and I was grateful.
    Some of the kindest magics are small ones.
    We went out together to sing at the bone-fire.
    Beltaine was, among other things, the season of generation, of marriages and of manmaking. At Samhain, which was the opposite festival on the wheel of seasons, druid judges settled dis—
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    putes and punished crimes. Debts were paid if they must be, broken partnerships dissolved, broken pots returned to the earth from which they were formed. Samhain, season of endings.
    Beltaine was the season of beginnings.
    For the first time in bardic memory, spring came to the territory of the Camutes that year while other tribes, even the Arvemi in the south, were still being pelted with sleet. This did not go unremarked. Word traveled fast in Gaul, shouted from village to village in relays. Soon the achievement of our druids was common knowledge.
    As a result, a prince of the Arverai, a man called Celtillus, sent his oldest son to us, requesting that the powerful druids of the Camutes conduct the youngster’s manmaking themselves. He would share in the ritual with the lads of our tribe.
    Menua tried not to let me see how flattered he was.
    In due course one of the boy’s uncles, a man called Gobannitio, brought his nephew to the Fort of the Grove in a four-wheeled, shield-hung wagon drawn by two wintershaggy horses. We had heard they were coming long before their arrival, and the fort was thrown into a frenzy of preparation. Even uninitiated boys, myself among them, were given weapons and sent to stand among the men at the gateway to impress the Arvemi with our