Cwen rises. She has that knowledge in her blood. She stretches. She looks out at the sea. Moon is up. The tide is in. It laps right up to the cliff where the peat is crumbling into the water. Cwen knows that the women are coming over tonight. She feels it. They will move over her, and around her, and through her, not seeing, but searching, not really knowing, but wanting. They have a song. It is a good one, from the histories, in which women lure men to their islands with apples. Begin a voyage across the clear sea, they sing. Go and find the Islands of Women. But this time, when the women arrive, Cwen will test them.

She doesn’t hold her breath.

She blows on the waves, and a breaker sloshes over their boat. It’s harmless – they get wet. Cwen waits to see what will happen. At least one of them cries. The rest of the women, drenched head to toe, move quickly. They carry their firewood up to the high part of the beach. They count each other, to be sure, and begin the slow process of lighting a fire.

As the sparks fly up into the night, the singing begins. They have lovely voices. Cwen watches the processing and the chanting. She watches them watching each other. They move over her, as the air has moved all this day with the birds; as plants have swayed with bees; as the waters have parted for the fish; as the earth has trembled with mice and rabbits. Now all these things are waiting. They are watching the women. They are waiting to see how Cwen will react.

Cwen thinks of Wind. Wind can help her.

With Wind in her hands, she moves through fire. The flames leap up towards the stars, and the women jump back. Cwen knows what the question is. It is not whether women can live with men – they can, they always have done – but whether they can live together; and beyond themselves, with the things not like them, water, trees, worms. The women who survive will be those who can hear the whales singing, smell the butterflies coming before they see them, sense the rain in the air, as Cwen had done.

The women glance at each other across the licking, rampant flames. These questions are almost completely unknown, unthought, even. Alone, without the presence of a male god; alone with the bees and each other? Firelight lights up everyone’s faces. Cwen thinks of how women think. All the time, they are comparing. She used to be thinner. How can she have let herself go? I can see her tummy through that top. Ooh, she’s got so thin and haggard. She judges them harshly for it. Like every woman, Cwen was beautiful once, and young. She got over it long ago. About fourteen hundred years back.