A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [193]
To consider some history, the people of Bel, that is, those tribes who chose the god Belinos to be their special patron deity from all the wide and rather randomly organized Celtic pantheon of gods, lived in a vaguely defined area of Gaul known as Devetia Riga. While the precise location has been lost, we may surmise that it was somewhere on the Atlantic coast, and more north than south. The Devetii, as they would have been known to the Romans, first came in contact with the classical Mediterranean cultures around 200 B.C. or so when Greek traders came their way, bringing wine, the art of writing, and other such luxuries. Civilization had little effect on them, however, until they were conquered by Julius Caesar just as so many other Gaulish tribes were. Although the great hero Vercingetorix made a gallant last stand at Alesia, in the end Roman organization and Roman stubbornness wore him down the way they wore down the heroes of so many other peoples of the ancient world.
With a great deal of grumbling, the people of Bel accepted to some extent the Roman yoke. They learned some Latin, adopted a few Roman customs, and studied the Hellenistic system of herbal medicine. They also sent a few of their druids to Rome as ambassadors, where, as so many other Gaulish ambassadors did, they met Cicero before his untimely end and purchased, upon the ex-consul’s recommendation, learned books to bring back to the tribe. Yet unlike so many other Gauls, the people of Bel always remembered their days of freedom.
When in A.D. 69 Julius Vindex, a Gaul who had risen high in the Roman government, led his rebellion against the corrupt emperor Nero, the men of Devetia were among the first to support him. When his rebellion failed, they would have followed him to the Otherlands by honorable suicide, as well, if it weren’t for the counsel of that rather mysterious figure, Cadwallon the Druid. It was Cadwallon who, along with the cadvridoc, Bran, led the Devetians on the Great Migration by means that could only have been magical. (The readers of this volume, in fact, are now in a position to know exactly how this journey was accomplished.) In the end, this migration took them to the shores of the continent that would be home to the new kingdom, Devetia Riga reborn, though over the years its name wore down to Deverry.
Glossary
ABER (Deverrian) A river mouth, an estuary.
ALAR (Elvish) A group of elves, who may or may not be bloodkin, who choose to travel together for some indefinite period of time.
ALARDAN (Elv.) The meeting of several alarli, usually the occasion for a drunken party.
ANGWIDD (Dev.) Unexplored, unknown.
ARCHON (translation of the Bardekian atzenarlen) The elected head of a city-state (Bardekian at).
ASTRAL The plane of existence directly “above” or “within” the etheric (q.v.). In other systems of magic, often referred to as the Akashic Record or the Treasure House of Images.
AURA The field of electromagnetic energy that permeates and emanates from every living being.
AVER (Dev.) A river.
BARA (Elv.) An enclitic that indicates that the preceding adjective in an Elvish agglutinated word is the name of the element following the enclitic, as can + bara + melim = Rough River, (rough + name marker + river.)
BEL (Dev.) The chief god of the Deverry pantheon.
BEL (Elv.) An enclitic, similar in function to bara, except that it indicates that a preceding verb is the name of the following element in the agglutinated term, as in Darabeldal, Flowing Lake.
BLUE LIGHT Another name for the etheric plane (q.v.).
BODY OF LIGHT AN ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT-FORM (q.v.) constructed by a dweomermaster to allow him or her to travel through the inner planes of existence.
BRIGGA (Dev.) Loose wool trousers worn by men and boys.
BROCH (Dev.) A squat tower in which people live. Originally, in the Homeland, these towers had one big fireplace in the center of the ground floor and a number of booths or tiny roomlets