“Okelos, you are to guide him and hunt with him, but be sure the stag is his, do you understand? After the hunt, when you come back to the village, tell us—all of us—everything you have seen. Is that clear?”
Okelos nodded, glowing with pride. It was the first time the chief priest had paid any attention to him since his man-making, and he interpreted it as a sign that Kernunnos recognized his mistake in not influencing the election of the chief. He sees now that I am strong and have good ideas, Okelos told himself. If I acquit myself well thisday, who can say what might happen?
The hunt was quickly arranged. Kazhak was disappointed that Taranis could not accompany him personally, due to the press of certain urgent tribal business that had just arisen, but he accepted Okelos good-naturedly. “You help Kazhak, Kazhak share stag’s liver with you,” he offered with customary generosity to a hunting companion.
Okelos hurried back to his lodge for his hunting spear, in case there was some lesser game worthy of his effort. He could think of no great stag living in the place described, which puzzled him, but of course the shapechanger would know better about such things. He looked forward to the hunt with keen anticipation.
Meanwhile, Epona had found it impossible to stay away from the Scythian horses. They fascinated her. They had an elegance of line, a harmony of proportion that made their use as riding animals seem inevitable; there was even a gentle curve to their backs, inviting one to sit. While the Scythians were occupied with Taranis and the elders, Epona pulled grass to feed their horses by hand and talked patiently to the animals, trying to make friends with their spirits.
It was another way of distracting herself from the coming full moon.
She saw Goibban return from the trading ring and almost immediately afterward she noticed Kernunnos, running low to the earth, dart between two lodges and head for the nearest stand of pines above the village. Beyond those pines lay the trail to the high pastures.
When the priest was out of the area Epona felt as if she could breathe more deeply. The anxiety that had floated over her all day like a gray cloud was lifted and she felt a surge of confidence.
There would never be a better opportunity.
She smoothed her hair and gown; she bit her lips to redden them; she thrust her shoulders back to lift her full breasts.
Now was the time, if the time was ever to be.
She headed for the forge, walking slowly, eager to know what Goibban would say and simultaneously putting off facing him as long as possible, just in case.
As she neared the forge she heard the rhythmic clang of metal on metal. In turns as patterned as those of a ritual dance, the apprentices were striking the orange-hot blade of a sword with their hammers, pounding the iron into its final shape. As each hammer struck the next was falling and the third was lifting away. Goibban held the blade with a pair of tongs, his gaze intent upon the work. He did not look up when Epona approached.
“Goibban …” she began.
“Wait, girl,” he muttered. “It is time for the quenching. We must be quiet while the spirit of the sword is tested … now!”
He lifted the glowing blade from the anvil and plunged it into a long trough of cold liquid. Clouds of sizzling steam obscured the interior of the forge. The apprentices held their breath in the urgency of the moment. Star metal was surrendering to the will of man.
The steam faded away. The blade lay quiet in its bath. With a reverent expression on his face, Goibban lifted it very gently. The apprentices leaned forward. Goibban examined the blade, stroking its surface with his burned and calloused thumb.
“Yes,” he said at last.
The apprentices broke into relieved grins and clapped one another on the back. Even Epona felt the relaxation of tension and the joy of accomplishment; it permeated the smoky forge with the sweetness of a job well done.
Goibban turned to his visitor.
Women—wives—had made that request before, but of course Epona must have some other reason. There was a pleading in her face. The girl was in some kind of trouble needing a strong man’s aid, or required a particular kind of work that only a smith could do. And who better than Goibban?
He smiled and wiped his hands on his leather apron. “Come to my lodge with me,” he invited. “There is no one there but my mother, and old Grania never puts her fingers in another’s bowl. Anything you have to say, you can say in front of her.”
He gave crisp instructions to his assistants and strode toward his lodge, Epona trotting at his heels like one of the hound puppies. Too late, she realized she should have walked at his shoulder, a woman and an equal, and she hurried to catch up. Her heart was beating very hard.
In Goibban’s lodge, Grania sat on the far side of the firepit, busy with some sewing. She greeted Epona politely with beer and bread, then forgot the girl was there, as people must do who share a lodge with others.
“What is it you need, Epona?” Goibban wanted to know. “I don’t make jewelry anymore, if you’re bringing an order from Rigantona. I’m training Vindos the White to work with soft metals, and …”
“I don’t want to order jewelry,” Epona interrupted, the words leaping out of her mouth before she had them properly arranged in her head. “I want you to marry me.” Then she stared aghast at him, astonished by her own audacity.
Goibban shook his head as if he had gotten water in his ears while swimming in the lake. “What did you say, Epona? I didn’t understand you.”
Having gone so far there was no turning back. Perhaps that was why she had blurted out the words so quickly. In a voice lowered by embarrassment, she said, “My mother has pledged me to Kernunnos to be trained as a gutuiter. I am unmarried. I am still hers and live in her lodge, though I’ve been to my woman-making. I have to go into the magic house at the next full moon unless some man asks for me as wife in the meantime. There are no wifeseekers here now, but if you were to ask for me, Goibban …”
The smith had been sitting on the edge of his bedshelf, hands dangling relaxed between his knees, but when he realized what Epona was suggesting he stood up abruptly. “I can’t marry you, Epona. You are of my own tribe!”
It was a credit to old Grania that the woman did not look up, but continued with her sewing. If the hand that held the bone needle trembled, it may have been due to her age.
“Don’t you like me?” Epona asked.
“Of course I like you, I like all the children, but that doesn’t mean …”
“I’m not a child any longer, I’m a woman,” she insisted, and for the second time he became aware of the intensity that smoldered in her like a banked fire.
He looked away in confusion. “Yes … I know, I mean, I can see you are a woman. But that makes no difference. Even if I wanted you …”
“Is it because of my broken arm, is that it? I’ve looked under the bandages, I know it’s going to heal all right, it will be straight. Goibban, I’m not going to be disfigured …”
“It isn’t that, Epona. You know it isn’t that.”
She caught one of his big hands in both of hers and held it tightly. “You are as important to the tribe as the Salt Mountain is,” she told him. “Taranis would order almost anything done to keep you content, I know it. If you tell him I am the price for your continuing to work the star metal, he will let us marry. He will!”
Goibban pulled his hand away from her as gently as he could. “I could not say that to the chief, Epona. It would be dishonest. I am content now, I need no bribe to keep me working the iron. I already have everything I want. I have my work to do, a good mother to cook my food and keep my fire, and the respect of the tribe. Whenever I want a woman I can almost have my choice; I’m in no hurry to seek a wife.
“No matter how much I like you, asking for you would complicate my life more than I care to do.”
“Are you afraid to do something that’s never been done before? Is that it?”
He seemed to swell like a frog filling itself with air to impress a rival. �
�I have done many things that were never done before, and I am not afraid of anything but starfire and earthquake,” he told her. “But I respect the pattern, the laws we live by, for what is man but his laws and his tribe? I will not break one and lose the respect of the other.
“If you have a chance to be drui, take it, Epona; that is my advice to you. Go to the magic house and be happy, as I am.”
She was shaking as if with a chill. “You’re a coward!” she flung at him. It was the ultimate insult and the anger in his eyes warned her she had gone too far, but she no longer cared. Goibban had been her secret safety; until this moment she had truly, deeply, believed he would take her, he would want her as much as she wanted him. She had been as confident of him as she was once confident of her parents and her place in the tribe. But now Goibban had refused her. Toutorix had gone to the otherworlds when she needed him most; Okelos had betrayed her, and Rigantona had traded her away like barter goods. The foundation stones of her life had crumbled beneath her feet, and all she had left was herself.
So be it, said the spirit within, speaking at last.
“You are a coward,” she repeated through clenched teeth, and saw Goibban unthinkingly double his fists. “Hit me,” she challenged him, putting her own hand on the hilt of the knife in her belt. “Just hit me, smith, and see what happens. I’m not afraid, like you. Hit me!”
Goibban let his hands fall open at his sides. He became aware that his mother was staring at him across the firepit.
“You had better leave, Epona,” he told the girl.
“Neither fire nor water would make me stay,” she answered, nursing her rage for the strength it gave her. She stalked past him and out of the lodge.
In the open air her situation hit her in the face like a reflection of sun on lake water, temporarily blinding her. Goibban had refused to stretch out his hand to her. All that awaited her now was the full moon, and the magic house.
And the shapechanger.
She drew a deep breath. “No,” she said to no one but the spirit within. “They can’t make me do it.” She began walking slowly through the village, unaware of direction, letting her feet pick the way.
Beyond the village, Kazhak and Okelos sought the great stag. Once past the palisade the two men had begun a steady upward climb, zigzagging along trails that were mere threads haphazardly strung across the mountain as if tossed by a petulant hand. Armies of pine marched. upward with them in dense ranks. The alpine silence was so deep it pressed on the ears; the altitude made Kazhak yawn repeatedly.
Several times Okelos hesitated and looked back, a puzzled frown on his face. “What is?” Kazhak asked each time, but Okelos only shook his head and trudged on. At last he stopped absolutely still, frozen like a wild animal at the sight of the hunter, and signaled Kazhak to do likewise.
The two men stood in a silence broken only by the thudding of their own hearts. The trail behind them was empty; no twig snapped, no branch moved. Yet Okelos was certain now that they were being followed. Then, like a trick of light, a face peered out of the trees for just the bat of an eyelid and disappeared again before Kazhak noticed it.
Kernunnos.
Druii business.
Okelos started to say something to Kazhak, but the spirit within stopped him. Whatever reason had brought the priest on their trail did not concern Okelos. He wanted no part of it. There were currents and undercurrents in everything involved with these Scythians; let Kernunnos take care of it.
“I thought I heard something, but I was wrong,” he told Kazhak. “Follow me; the place we seek is not far away now.”
They were moving along the edge of a cliff where part of the mountain had been torn away by heavy snow, forming a treacherous rock slide. The two men were forced to walk single file, their weapons in their hands. Above the narrow trail the slope was steep and heavily forested; below yawned the devastated ruin left by the avalanche.
Kazhak was following Okelos closely. Suddenly he drew a sharp intake of breath and whispered, “Deer!”
Okelos peered ahead but saw nothing. He looked up the slope into the dark trees but there was no flash of a red hide.
“Where?” he asked the Scythian.
“There, there!” Kazhak pointed straight ahead. “Big stag. Biggest stag Kazhak ever see.”
Okelos looked along the trail in bafflement. Shortly ahead of them it lifted and rounded a curve, disappearing from their vision as it climbed upward to a hidden strip of meadow. As far as Okelos could see, there was no deer.
By now Kazhak was burning with the lust of the hunter. Deftly fitting an arrow to his bow, he shouldered Okelos aside and hurried up the path, oblivious to everything but the giant stag. No mountain man would have been so careless of his footing; but Kazhak was not a mountain man.
Then Okelos saw it, just where the trail turned from sight: a brown shadow and a magnificent rack of antlers, proudly lifted. With a thrill of horror he realized it was no normal deer that waited there, on the very edge of the precipice, luring Kazhak on.
Kazhak saw a stag. A huge stag. A stag to boast of for the rest of one’s life. He grinned in total joy and released his first arrow, only to see the animal flicker from sight and vanish around the bend. How could he have missed at such a distance? Grabbing the next arrow from his case he ran forward, exulting in the moment, obsessed with the kill. On the narrow trail the animal could not possibly escape him.
There it was again, just ahead. Not running away but standing squarely, challengingly, the equal of any hunter, a creature of pride and passion like himself. The thought came to him that he and the stag had each been shaped for this one glorious confrontation, the ultimate expression of their malehood.
The stag lowered its head and brandished its many-branched antlers to threaten him, and with a laugh Kazhak sprang toward it, forgetting his bow, forgetting the mountain, seized with the idea of meeting the creature in hand-to-hand combat—this splendid beast who would not run, but stood to fight. He would grab it by its antlers and wrestle it to the earth with his bare hands; he would cut its throat and spill its blood onto the mountain soil.
That would be a tale to tell!
Okelos started to yell a warning but his words dried in his throat and he watched in silence, unable to change what was about to happen, while Kazhak hurled himself at the thing he thought was a deer.
The stag’s eyes, huge and liquid and brown, were fixed on the Scythian, and then they changed and Kazhak realized they were not the eyes of a deer. In the final moment left him, after he had already committed himself to the forward momentum of a powerful leap, the eyes became yellow and piercing and … human.
Kazhak struggled desperately to check himself and regain his balance, but he had been lured too far. His feet hit the crumbling shale at the edge of the slide and the earth dropped away beneath him. Okelos, close on his heels, had to spring backward to avoid being trapped by its sudden collapse as the shale tumbled downward.
Kazhak waved his arms wildly, overbalanced for an eternal moment, then cartwheeled out into space.
Down, down, a sickening drop through stinging stones and choking dirt, the cruel fingers of exposed roots gouging him as he clawed for handholds he could not catch. The side of the mountain seemed to lean toward him and then pull away. He slid into and through a gully running vertically down the face of the slope; he had the impression of being caught between two cliffs, like the molars of a giant carnivore, chewing, closing on him, and then opening just before he would have been crushed.
His body hit a stony outcropping with an impact that knocked all the air from his lungs in an agonized whoosh and slowed his downward plunge but did not stop it. He tumbled on again, picking up speed, the scree falling away from him. He endured a forever of falling.
Then his head struck something solid and his skull filled with exploding stars.
Chapter 12
Okelos got to Kazhak as quickly as he could, sliding down the mountain himself, cursing and badly frighte
ned. He had almost fallen to his death with the Scythian, and the footing was still treacherous. But honor demanded he recover his guest’s body, even at the risk of his own life.
Okelos now regretted having come on the hunt. Some honors were better declined, and this was one of them. Tardily he realized he might have been intended to go over the precipice too; had Taranis and Kernunnos arranged it between them, to end any challenge Okelos might someday make for the chief’s staff? Yes, said the spirit within.
At last, breathless and bruised, he reached the Scythian’s crumpled body. It was badly abraded on face and hands, and a thin stream of blood was running from one nostril, but to Okelos’ astonishment, the dark eyes opened as he bent over the supposedly dead man and Kazhak muttered something.
Okelos squatted beside him. “What did you say?”
The Scythian stifled a groan and made himself grin instead.
“No … stag. Fool Kazhak. Big … joke on Kazhak, is it so?” His eyes closed and he lay still.
He was breathing steadily, however, and gave every indication that he intended to go on breathing. He would have to be taken to the village immediately; by the time Okelos could bring help back some wild animal might find him and accomplish what the shapechanger had failed to do.
Okelos was strongly moved at this moment to thwart the shapechanger.
He struggled with the unconscious body, trying to find the best way to carry it, and at last got it hoisted across his back and shoulders and began picking his way diagonally down the slope, trying to find safe footing so that both men would reach the village alive.
The children were the first to notice his arrival. Approaching from the pasture trail he was not seen by a sentry, and had almost reached the center of the village, with a pack of youngsters crowding at his heels asking questions, before any of the adults was aware of Okelos and his burden and ran to help him.
The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) Page 17