The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn)

by Llywelyn, Morgan

  Kazhak leaned forward eagerly at the mention of Maikop. “You know Kolaxais, Prince of Horses?” he asked, as a man does who is starved of news of home. “Kolaxais takes many horses to Maikop.”

  The Thracian hesitated. “Who has not heard of Kolaxais?” he asked. There was a falter in his pronunciation of the name and the light went out of Kazhak’s eyes. “Never heard of Kolaxais,” he whispered in an aside to Epona. “Thracian lie.” Kazhak grinned suddenly; the brotherhood of horse men was thereby dissolved, as far as he was concerned.

  Kazhak gestured toward Aksinya. “That man my brother,” he said, “has iron knives of the Kelti in pack on horse. You never see such good knives. You know good horses, Sea of Grass, so Kazhak offer you special trade. Pack of Aksinya, unopened, for one of Provaton’s wagons, unsearched. Blind trade, between friends. No one looks.” He grinned. It was a remarkably innocent grin, all teeth and wide eyes.

  “I could not do that,” Provaton said stiffly. “How could I explain to my principals at home, who financed this train? A loaded wagon with two good horses is worth more than anything you could possibly be carrying in one pack. Unless you have gold as well as iron, that is.”

  The grin was fixed on Kazhak’s face. “Is well known, Scyth always has gold,” he said noncommittally.

  The Thracian cast a second glance at the bulging pack on the horse behind Aksinya. Aksinya scowled as a man does who fears he is about to be robbed.

  It might be better to accept this trade, no matter how unfair, in hopes the Scythians would be satisfied and let us go on, Provaton thought. And if it was really true about the keltoi iron … and it could be, they had the woman with them …

  Suddenly the Thracian tensed and whirled around, looking back along his little line of wagons. He had just realized that the other Scythians had moved away and were now bracketing the train between them, as hunting dogs would work a small herd of deer.

  Provaton had been having a discouraging summer. He was definitely very far out of tune.

  “What are those men doing?” he asked Kazhak sharply.

  Kazhak’s reply was bland. “Sitting on horses. No harm.” He sounded disinterested.

  Provaton did some quick mental calculation. It had been a disastrous trip, with many of his men lost to a fever contracted in a swampy valley between the Elbe and the Oder. His merchandise really was inferior, for the reason he had given Kazhak, but his backers would accept no excuses. If he had some superior iron-work to show them—and there were already rumors about keltoi iron—

  A gamble on life was better than sure death.

  He forced his voice to be hearty, as if there were no threat. “I like your trade,” he said to Kazhak. “It amuses me. I might be willing to let you have one wagon … that one, with the brown gelding and the chestnut mare … in return for your pack, if it really contains keltoi iron.”

  “Shortswords Kelti call daggers,” Kazhak informed him. “Best anywhere. My men all wear now.”

  Epona followed this exchange with relief. She had known a bad moment when the Thracian called attention to her, but now it seemed everything was going to be all right. Kazhak rode his stallion toward the wagon in question and she looked at the two horses, waiting in their traces.

  Before the spirit within could warn her to keep silent, she said, “Not that wagon, Kazhak.”

  Startled, the Thracian leader looked at her a second time, with the appraising eyes of a merchantman. Such a woman would bring a high price in the great slave market at Thasos, where the Ionian colonials made fabulous offers for unusual females.

  Kazhak turned in his saddle. “Why not this wagon?” he asked her.

  “One of the horses is ill,” she told him.

  Kazhak’s dark brows crawled up his forehead like caterpillars. “How you know?”

  “I am Kelt,” she replied, the only experience she could give. How could she make someone not of the people understand the aura of pain that radiated from the chestnut mare?

  “My horses are in perfect health!” Provaton protested.

  “Show us,” Kazhak ordered.

  While they all watched, Epona slid down from the gray stallion and walked to the team in question. The chestnut mare watched her approach, its eyes red rimmed and eloquent with anguish. It suffered silently as horses must, but the pain poured from it in waves, lapping around Epona. She had to brace herself against it; she had to force herself to touch the suffering animal.

  She bent and pressed her ear to the mare’s belly. She heard none of the customary rumblings and gurglings of a healthy horse’s intestines. When she closed her eyes she imagined something burning inside, like fire, eating the mare alive.

  She straightened up and turned to Kazhak. “This horse is poisoned,” she told him. “She has eaten some weed along the way and it has given her blocked bowels and a terrible pain in her belly. She will not live long.”

  The driver of the Thracian wagon had not understood many of her words but he understood the familiar gesture of a head pressed against the belly of a horse suffering from colic. He knew his mare, the greedy mare who had snatched feed from the roadside all the way from Moesia to the Baltik and back again.

  Now Provaton put his hand on the mare’s neck and felt it just beginning to dampen with sweat, the slick, unhealthy sweat of an animal in pain.

  How could the girl have known, sitting many paces away on another horse?

  The driver got down from his wagon and came to stand beside Epona. His eyes were dark with worry.

  The mare’s head began to droop lower. As they watched, bloody strings of mucus started running from her nostrils and her eyes half closed. Then suddenly they flared open as a spasm shook her and she tossed her head up wildly, pawing the earth.

  The pain was unbearable.

  “Take her out of the traces,” Epona said.

  The Thracian men stared at her. Who was this woman to be giving orders? She had little command of their language but her gestures were expressive; she meant them to be obeyed, just as if she had some degree of authority.

  Kazhak narrowed his eyes and glared at Epona, wondering what sort of Kelti trickery this might be. His men watched with cynical amusement. Kazhak had taken this on himself, this peculiar foreign woman. Let him deal with her.

  Ignoring them all, Epona began fumbling with the traces and after a moment’s hesitation the wagon driver helped her. He jumped back, however, when the mare lashed out in her agony, her hoof narrowly missing his head.

  Once free of the wagon the mare reared and pawed at the sky, pulling Epona off the ground as the girl clung to her bridle. The men tried to help then but Epona waved them back, and for some reason none of them could understand, they obeyed her. They stood in a circle, beyond the reach of the desperate, convulsing mare, and left the young woman alone with the horse.

  The pain was a living thing, a hand that grabbed the intestines and squeezed. The mare and Epona suffered it together, fighting with crazed fear, but fear was not sufficient. Epona tried to block off that part of her mind so she could think; concentrate. She held on grimly as the mare whirled in a circle, dragging her. She reached out with her inner being, grasping for some touch of the great fire of life, summoning its strength and support.

  A moment of peace came to both of them. The mare stopped her frantic struggling and stood with braced legs, fighting for breath. Epona relinquished her hold on the bridle and flattened her body against the body of the mare, her breasts against the heaving sides, vulnerable to any move the horse might make in its dying agony. Behind her closed eyes she spoke to the spirits she knew and the unfamiliar ones that surrounded them in this place. She had not been taught the signs and invocations; she could only fashion them from her own intuition and pray that was sufficient.

  The pain had come quickly; it would kill quickly. The mare was finding it agonizing to breathe, which added to her panic. Once her knees buckled and her forequarters sank to the ground, and Epona went down with her, holding on tightly
, while the mare’s driver moaned and wrung his hands. A horse down was a horse dead.

  The mare’s eyes were glazing, but somehow she got to her feet again, Epona clinging to her like a burr. The girl’s entire being was absorbed by the pain now, but still she prayed to the spirit of life. There was nothing but the pain and the prayer.

  The mare convulsed and Kazhak shouted a warning. The girl would be trampled. The mare was so wild none of his men were willing to get close to her and pull Epona free; they could only watch helplessly as she stayed with the plunging, bellowing horse, concentrating with singleminded ferocity on the pain, pulling it, drawing it out, now … it will ease … now!

  They saw her face go white beneath the golden freckles. The mare’s eyes rolled in her head in the death agony, and she screamed like a human being. Her mate, still in the traces, whinnied in sympathy.

  The chestnut mare stood on spraddled legs, head hanging, but she did not go down. Even as they watched, unbelieving, the glaze of death passed from her eyes. Her breathing steadied. The flow of bloody mucus from her nostrils slowed, then stopped. She raised her head and pricked her ears with interest when her teammate whinnied a second time.

  Epona staggered away and flung herself down on the grass, panting.

  The men crowded around her, demanding to know what she had done and how she had done it, but there was respect tinged with awe in their voices. It would have been a heady moment for Epona if she had not felt so sick and exhausted. Her mouth tasted of bile and her insides were sore. She lay propped on one elbow, waiting for the earth to stop spinning around her.

  A little distance away the wagon driver was giving his recovered mare a thorough examination, shaking his head in amazement. The mare had defecated and was trying to graze.

  Provaton addressed Kazhak. “What will you take for the woman?” he asked bluntly. “One wagon, two? More?”

  Kazhak surveyed the wagon train. He did not have enough men to drive it home, and on closer inspection it had the shabby look of something not worth the effort.

  But the woman was different.

  “She is not for sale,” he said.

  Epona did not know whether she should feel relieved or dejected. The Thracians were an artistic, creative people on the eastern edge of the increasingly brilliant world of the Hellenes. Life among them might be considered preferable to life on the Sea of Grass, among the nomads.

  But she had ridden the horse; she had felt the wind on her teeth and looked ahead to unlimited horizons, knowing that beneath her was the strength to take her there.

  She tried to catch Kazhak’s eye. She smiled at him, willing him to remember their bodies together.

  “I will give you the best possible price,” Provaton insisted, trying to keep from begging, which always ruined a deal. But the keltoi woman made his mouth water. He would not sell her to the Ionian colonials; he would take her around to the prosperous horsebreeders in the valley of the Maritsa and let her heal their valuable animals, then sit back and watch as they filled his purse with gold. He would be independently wealthy; there would be no more long months of swallowing dust along the trade routes, fighting to stay alive and make a slim profit. He would be a great man at last, with his own villa and stables. He would step in rhythm for the rest of his days.

  “Woman is not for sale,” Kazhak reiterated, seeing the lust in the Thracian’s eyes. Having acquired Epona almost inadvertently, there were times during the trip when he would have gladly traded her, but not now. Now he knew what he had, even if he did not understand it.

  He would be bringing great treasure to the Sea of Grass.

  Interest in lesser trades was forgotten. There was a little desultory conversation about the wagon and the pack of iron daggers, but neither side pushed very hard. There was only one prize worth having, it seemed, and the Thracians lacked the strength to take it by force.

  Once they reached their homelands, however, they would be quick to tell of the incident, of the great horse-healer of the keltoi. It was too good a story to keep. Perhaps, thought Provaton, funds could be raised for an expedition into the Scythian territories to try to find and capture her.

  Or perhaps there were others like her among the keltoi. It would be wise to take his wagons into the high mountains next year and do a little business there, see what was available. If he could keep his skin whole and his head on his shoulders until next year.

  “You saved my horse,” he told Kazhak, “and it would be a great favor to me if you would let me give you a gift in return. You and your men can … ah … each choose something from the wagons. Whatever you like.”

  “One thing each?” Kazhak asked, narrowing his eyes. “That is all horse worth to you?”

  “I have to make a living,” Provaton protested. “I have a wife and six children, and I am a younger son, I rent my house …”

  Kazhak was bored with this man. “Take,” he said to the other Scythians, gesturing toward the wagons. “Take one good thing each, if there is any good thing, and we go. And something for you,” he added to Epona, urging her forward to select a bauble.

  They left Provaton standing in the road beside his wagons, the dust of their passage settling onto his shoulders, his eyes following Epona’s golden head until she and the horsemen were mere specks in the distance.

  “Remember that woman,” he said to his men. “Remember everything about her.”

  Chapter 18

  Everything was changed. Kazhak’s men, who had treated Epona with indifference if they acknowledged her presence at all, now looked at her as they would have looked at a two-headed colt born to one of the herd mares, with awe and pride. Something inexplicable had happened at the instigation of the woman: A horse all could see was dying, doomed, had been restored to life. It was not possible, but they had seen it. She had risked her own life to fight for the existence of the crazed mare, and she had won.

  None of the men who had seen that would ever look at her in the same way again.

  Kazhak was newly careful with her, and no longer made her walk at intervals to rest the stallion. Instead he had one of the other men walk and put Epona on that man’s horse, leading it himself. He gave her first choice of the food at night and first drink of water, immediately after the horses.

  None of the other men objected.

  Kazhak lay beside her at night, looking up at the stars, and thought about the Kelti woman as he had never thought of any other woman, and when he entered her body it was with a tenderness bordering on reverence.

  They continued eastward, until the sun rose to greet them above a new range of mountains.

  “Carptos,” Kazhak identified them, squinting into the morning light.

  The plains lifted toward the mountains in salute to the greater force.

  “Not as tall as your mountains,” Kazhak commented to Epona. “But very steep. Very dark.”

  Dark? What could he mean by that? And why was he taking this route? “I thought you didn’t like to take horses into mountains,” she reminded him. “You said their feet were badly broken by the stones when you came to us.”

  Kazhak grunted an assent. “Stones break feet, yes. And we could follow Duna south into land of Moesia, then north, then east, crooked way to Black Sea, but there is much swampland that way. Fevers, sickness, for man and horse. So we go shorter way through mountains again and if horses’ feet break you fix, is it so?”

  A horse dying of a poison weed was one thing; broken feet, another. To solve the problem of the latter, Goibban had only recently begun making and nailing iron shoes onto the feet of the cartponies, but such skills were beyond Epona’s ability. The power had come to her when she summoned it, but she knew deep inside that power had been for a specific purpose, and within the limitations of her own gift. She could not fix a split hoof in the same way.

  But it might be wise not to say that to Kazhak. She enjoyed hearing the respect in his voice; she enjoyed being given the more choice morsels of food, instead of having to wait
for the leavings.

  The plains gave way to woodlands, a thick green fleece climbing the slopes. The Scythians found a stream to follow and all dismounted, leading their horses as the incline grew steeper. Giant crowding conifers created a dense shade. Perhaps this is what Kazhak meant by dark mountains, Epona thought.

  The first night they camped, though still in the foothills, Epona could already smell the thinner air and feel the difference in altitude in her chest and forehead.

  Mountains. This is home for me, she thought. This feels right.

  Mountains were not home to the Scythians. As they progressed deeper into the Carptos, following streams and game trails and the occasional paths of trappers or woodcutters, they grew progressively more edgy. All the men darted sidelong glances into the woods, and stopped from time to time to listen, with inheld breath and tense faces.

  Autumn had already come to these mountains, and winter was not far behind, with gray skies and somber colors. A pervasive chill was in the air as Epona and the four Scythians climbed through forests of conifer and oak twisted into grotesque shapes by wind and ice. Great outcroppings of stone broke, with savage thrusts, through the thin soil. Rugged crags brooded above deep valleys blanketed with silence.

  Although Epona’s heart had warmed to the sight of mountains again, it chilled in her breast in the Carptos.

  Something is wrong, Epona thought. She said nothing to Kazhak, however; the Scythian leader seemed sunk in one of his blackest moods and no one spoke to him more than necessary, fearing a slashing reply or a fist in the mouth. He did not hesitate to hit his men when they angered him.

  The Scythians stopped to make camp earlier in the day than they had on the flowered plains, and they built a fire every night, cherishing its bright flame. By unspoken agreement they traveled along the line of settlements strung through the forest, heartened by the sight of human habitation.

  Forbidding as these mountains seemed, they were home to a hardy people who lived by trapping and mining. Like the Kelti, they were fiercely independent folk, hard workers who pitted their strength and endurance against the challenge of the earth mother. At night they sat around their own lodgefires and told tales not dissimilar to those of Epona’s people.