The other men did not offer any objection to Epona’s having the horse. Once they would have expressed outrage, but much had happened, and they were changed men. They had originally left the Sea of Grass as part of a large party of tribesmen, thinking of themselves as brothers, avid for new lands and ready, they thought, for anything. They were returning depleted in number and diminished in spirit. Their fire was quenched, temporarily.
The brown gelding was neither as powerful nor as smooth gaited as Kazhak’s stallion, but he was a surefooted animal with a good disposition. His only reaction to his new rider was a fretful tossing of his head until Epona got used to managing the reins and the bit. The girl was delighted to realize how easy it was to communicate with the horse, just by the lightest touch on the reins. She taught her hands to be gentle, mastering the rider’s art of give and take. Soon she had learned that she could whisper to the horse through her fingers and his mouth. By the end of the first day they were friends.
She rode.
With the horse beneath her, the glory of command surrendered to her hands and her will, the horizon spread beckoning before her … she rode.
Every step took them closer to the birthplace of the sun, the Black Sea region, the land of the nomads. On a morning of blue sky and high clouds they left a final strip of woodland and rode down a gentle slope to a shallow stream. Beyond the stream they climbed a steep incline, the horses plunging upward. Then they were at the top and the forests were all behind them. They trotted through a last sparse stand of birches and rode out, blinking against a sudden flood of yellow light, onto the Sea of Grass.
The prairie stretched into forever, dwarfing the flowered plain that had so impressed Epona on the other side of the Carpatos. This tableland had no limits as she knew limits. A human being, riding down from the mountains, out of the embrace of the forests, would feel himself shrinking with every step he took onto the grasslands.
Light was everywhere, a constant like the wind. No longer just above, it went around and through; it dominated. Nothing blocked it. They rode in light as if in the belly of a god.
The land undulated gently; it was a calm sea. When the wind caught the grasses they rippled into waves, reflecting light from their surfaces in constantly changing patterns that gave an impression of watery motion.
At first the unrelieved prairie was a novelty and Epona rode with slack rein, drinking in the landscape with her eyes. Waving stalks still bearing heavy seedheads rose as high as the horses’ shoulders, and the animals snatched bites of grass as they traveled, never having to lower their heads to eat. The frost that chilled the mountains had not yet reached the plains.
The relentless sun of summer had scorched the vegetation, so Epona initially thought it was all one color, but when she looked closer she realized the color was not uniform and the various blades of grass were not identical. Some still showed traces of the silvery-green they had worn in spring; others were streaked with russet; still others had broad, dull leaves the horses nosed aside and did not eat. Each stalk of grass was as individual as a person, its nature shaped by the spirit within. In some places were patches where grass had failed to grow and Epona caught glimpses of the bare earth, dark brown like horse dung, starred with blue and yellow blossoms of some bold, late-blooming flower. She leaned from the saddle to get a better look at the plants, but they were only a blur beneath the feet of the trotting horses.
“Can we go more slowly here?” she called to Kazhak.
“Slow for why?”
“I want to look at the grass.” Her answer sounded foolish in her own ears, and Kazhak laughed.
“Look!” he cried, dropping the reins on the stallion’s neck and flinging his arms wide, as if to embrace the land from horizon to horizon. “Look at grass. Everywhere!”
When her eye tired of the rippling sea of plant life, Epona tilted her head back and looked at the sky, the immense sky that was so much larger than she had realized. It curved over the land like a bowl. Once she had thought the sky was immutably limited by mountains and framed by the vertical slashes of pine trees, but now she saw she had been wrong. The sky could not be so captured.
The Sea of Grass showed her the reality of Sky.
Clouds billowed up into forms she had never seen in the mountains. They became mountains themselves, towering thunderheads that rose above the steppes and carried the day on their shoulders. Theirs was the dazzling white of sunlit snow. She watched them until spots danced in her eyes, trusting the brown horse to follow his companions without her guiding hand on the reins. She was almost blinded by the glare of cloud and sky. She closed her eyes. They felt hot inside her lids and there was no soothing darkness, just a blue burning.
When she opened her eyes again the sky was still there but a strong wind was chasing the thunderheads before it, over the horizon and beyond.
Her mind could not stretch to Beyond.
The sky was too big. It began to oppress her. It crouched above her throughout the day, pushing her down, making her small. Without the cloud pillars to hold it up it might crush her. She wanted to cower beneath it and offer sacrifice, begging for mercy. Yet it went on and on, and they rode on and on beneath it, and nothing changed.
How could men live under such a sky?
She reined the brown gelding close to Kazhak’s horse and tried to talk about her feelings. The Scythian listened politely, but he did not understand. The woman seemed to think there was something wrong with the land, whereas he knew that things had just become right again.
He tried to reassure her. “Here on grassland men look big,” he told her, speaking from his own feelings. “Men stand tall on Sea of Grass, cast long shadows, is it so? In forest, trees are bigger. In mountains, mountains are bigger. Here, nothing stands taller than Kazhak on horse. Is good place. Is best place.”
That might be true for him, but Epona felt diminished by the landscape. How could there be one truth for him and another for her? She turned that question over and over in her curious mind, trying to make both pieces fit together into one whole.
For a while they had seen distant fingerings of woodland stretching out onto the prairie, but soon those too were left behind and the only trees they saw were those marking streams and rivers; waterways that became less frequent as they moved on across the prairie. Epona began looking for those few trees as for familiar faces, hungering for a sight of branch and leaf.
As she had done with water, Epona had always taken trees for granted. The forests were an integral part of Kelti life, satisfying both their physical and spiritual needs. Epona’s people lived in lodges built of timber and prayed to the spirits of the trees that supplied the logs. They burned wood for heat and cooking, reduced more wood to charcoal to feed the insatiable appetites of forge and smelter, ate from wooden bowls, used wooden tools and utensils, and shared intimately in the life of the trees; the breathing, sentient beings who occupied space with them on the earth mother.
The Kelti took fruits from the trees and leaves and roots for medicinal purposes; they used bark for dyes and were famed throughout the trade routes for their resins. From studying a given tree, a drui could predict the cycles of drought, that his people might prepare for them. A sentry could use that same tree as a lookout post, and when that tree’s spirit had moved on to its nextlife the trunk might become a rooftree in a lodge, a carved chest for a new wife, or beams or doors or embracing walls.
The tree was not just part of life, it embodied life. Epona had never realized the sight of trees was essential to her inner self until she rode onto the Sea of Grass, and looked at endless, treeless prairie.
Night did not come suddenly on the steppe. Epona only gradually became aware of a change in the light, and the great distance the sun had traveled while they themselves were going the other way. Light that had been yellow in the morning became white, then amber, and at last lay in flat, violetcolored planes across the land as the sun died in the west.
The young woman pulled her cloak
more tightly about her. She was not eager to spend a night, naked and vulnerable as she felt, beneath that gaping maw of sky. She hoped they would at least seek a stream bank for their encampment, so she might look at trees before she fell asleep.
The Scythians did not feel the absence of trees. They camped beneath the open sky, simply stopping when it was too dark to see well. They passed the waterskins and made their few preparations for the night as serenely as if there were log walls around them. Beside Epona, Kazhak went to sleep on his back, face turned upward.
Epona could not sleep. She curled herself into the smallest possible ball and closed her eyes tightly, but that only served to make the unfamiliar night sounds of the grasslands more audible. The wind, which had blown all day, now moaned like a tormented spirit. It spoke the language of an unknown place; it was not the familiar wind of the mountains.
Stranger, it said to her. Foreigner. You do not belong here.
Epona could not bear to lie with her eyes closed while that great voice swept over her. She rolled over on her back and opened her eyes, looking up.
And the stars looked down at her.
The stars!
The earth seemed to heave beneath her. She scrabbled frantically, her fingers clawing the grass and soil on which she lay, clutching for a hold that would keep her from tumbling down … up? … into the myriad stars. Stars beyond the ability of man to count or mind to understand, stars that robbed her of her equilibrium and left her dazed, staring into the depths of boundless sky.
Epona had been raised with the nearby, familiar spirits of animal and plant, water and fire and stone. She had been taught to understand the aspects of the earth mother upon whom her people had depended for game and timber, copper and salt. She had been taught to revere the sun and moon as distant, less-immediate powers with a strong influence on the earth mother and thereby on her, but at one remove.
She had hardly ever bothered to think about the stars. They were tiny lights in a sky narrowed and framed by mountain peaks; they were eyes that watched but had little meaning.
Now, lying on her back and staring at the immense night sky arching over the broad steppe Epona felt the magnitude of stars for the first time, and was forced to acknowledge them. The bards told of a time in the far past when the people had been more involved with the great lights in the sky than people in thistime, dealing with them in complex ways that no one now remembered or would understand. But that was in the dawn of the race, and much had changed. Snow and ice grind boulders into sand. Now the stars were an alien multitude, watching the earth with glittering indifference, and Epona felt pitifully small in their presence.
I have shrunk away to nothing, she told herself. I am less than a blade of grass among too many blades of grass, underneath too many stars.
I was born Kelti, but I am afraid, even so.
I was arrogant; I thought I had importance. Now I have disappeared and no one will ever know or care.
She lay pinned to the earth, the boundaries of her small world blown away.
When she awoke it was to birdsong. She opened her eyes and saw a little bird, even tinier than she had felt the night before, sitting on a blade of grass not far from her head and singing to her without fear. Its size did not matter; its spirit was sufficient.
She smiled at the bird and began to feel better.
Birds on the Sea of Grass sang songs different from those of mountain birds, and it seemed to Epona they sang louder. They began their sunrise prayer with a burst of exultation that came from the very air above, rather than from trees or woodland cover. As they sang, they were accompanied by a lovely sound Epona eventually identified as the omnipresent wind, harping the grasses.
It was as if the earth mother had known her distress, and sent comfort to Epona on the wings and in the songs of birds.
She raised her head and saw Kazhak awake, looking at her. “It is … lovely here, I think,” she commented, and his eyes told her he was pleased.
Kazhak arose feeling expansive. He talked, he joked, he tried to cajole Dasadas and Aksinya out of more somber moods. True, Basl was dead; but the pale wolf no longer followed them. Nothing could track them while suffering from such a wound.
“We have lost many brothers,” he said, “but death happens. While we live, let us live.”
They broke their fast with meat and sips of water and galloped eastward, Kazhak leading, his heels drumming the sides of the gray stallion.
They could not keep up such a pace all day, however, and eventually slowed to a walk to let the horses blow. Kazhak turned to Epona. “Why you smile?”
“I was listening to the birds sing. I think I never appreciated birdsong before.”
“You know any songs? Can you sing about the horse, the wind, the feathergrass, maybe?”
“My people don’t have songs about those things,” she told him.
“What else is to sing about?”
“We sing the songs of the spirits and the history of the people. We sing to remember all that has gone before.”
Kazhak frowned. “Is bad custom. Better to forget the past. Day go, night come, new day next. Ride ahead, no look back.”
“But the past isn’t gone,” she argued. “It still influences everything we do and are.” She thought it better not to explain that the past was one of the otherworlds, and the druii had access to the otherworlds.
Perhaps Kazhak’s way was better, after all—ride on and do not look back. Do not turn your head and see the dead farmers in their field, or your abandoned home and friends, or the sha …
“Why don’t you sing?” she asked Kazhak hurriedly, interrupting her own thoughts.
He chuckled. “Kazhak sing, horses run away.”
“Then what about Dasadas and Aksinya?”
“They sing some; they dance better. Ride best. Riding is always best. Only Thracians want music all the time.”
Yet he had asked her to sing. He must enjoy music, too.
They rode side by side, their horses’ heads nodding in unison. Aksinya and Dasadas followed several paces behind. At Epona’s urging, Kazhak began to tell her of the customs of his own people, and their conversation was carried on the wind to the two who followed.
Aksinya paid no attention, but Dasadas listened closely, his ears attuned to the sound of Epona’s voice. He was the youngest of the band of Scythians, not many years past childhood but powerfully built, with clearcut features that might have been formed by a craftsman’s chisel, and a heavy mane of light-brown hair. Since the incident of the Thracian horse, Dasadas had watched Epona as keenly as Aksinya watched for game to shoot. When Epona gestured, Dasadas noticed. When she spoke, he listened.
Now he watched the back of her head with somber passion, his pale eyes glowing in their deep sockets.
Once, Dasadas had agreed with his friends who thought the Kelti woman was an unnecessary encumbrance and resented Kazhak for bringing her. Then he had watched in disbelief as the girl pressed her body against that of the crazed, dying horse, ignoring the thrashing legs and deadly, striking hooves. Epona had somehow reversed the effects of the poison weed by her physical presence and her will. It was more than magic; to Dasadas it seemed to be the visitation of a god.
He was shaken and dazzled. He no longer saw Epona as a mere woman. She was a supernatural being to him now, the possessor of unknown powers. He thought her both terrible and beautiful. His eyes followed her constantly; he could think of nothing else.
Epona, Epona. Epona sitting on a horse as no woman had done before, head thrown back, yellow hair blowing free, warm voice laughing. Epona, silent and withdrawn, brooding over mysteries. Epona, as elusive as the wind in the Sea of Grass.
Epona, Epona.
“Is bad we had to bury Basl like seed, just stuck in hole in ground,” Kazhak was saying. “He will not grow; he will not make nice plant horses can eat.” His eyes twinkled. Even in his friend’s death, Kazhak could find something to joke about if he was in the right mood. He had done
his mourning the night of Basl’s death, when he and the others had stabbed their own ear lobes with their knives and shrieked the dead man’s name aloud, tearing their hair and their clothes, wild in their grief.
But that was over now; they had ridden away.
“If Basl died on Sea of Grass, among people of the horse,” Kazhak told Epona, “would have been big funeral. While some build death house, we feast and mourn forty days to show proper respect for a brother, a comrade. Then we bury Basl in wooden house.”
“Forty days!” Epona’s mind presented her with a picture of how Basl’s body would have looked after forty days, unburied.
Kazhak grinned. “Body keep. Open belly, clean out inside, fill with cypress, parsley seed, frankincense. Sew up skin, seal with wax. Family of Basl put body on wagon and take to visit every tribe in area, say farewell. Men from one tribe accompany body to next tribe, on and on. Forty days. Then back to death house and burial. Everyone gets to see Basl before he is gone. Nice custom, is it so?”
Epona could not think of an appropriate comment. “Are there many tribes of your race?” she asked instead.
Kazhak shook his head in assent. “Many tribes, each different, but all men of the horse. Live from shore of the sea all the way north to the forest land. Kazhak’s line is of royal blood from homeland on river Tanais, what blackcloaks call the Don.”
“Who are the blackcloaks?”
“Savages, live north of grassland. Not horse people.” His voice was contemptuous. “Many savages live on edges of Sea of Grass; smart ones stay out of our way. Man can ride fourteen days, east or west, see only Scythians.”
“What are some of those others like, those savages?” Epona wanted to know. It amused her to hear Kazhak so patronizingly refer to others as savage.
“Is race of baldheads,” he told her. “Dirt diggers, farmers. Is race who live by wrecking ships on seacoast, people called Tauri; never laugh, those Tauri. Vultures.” The shipwreckers were distasteful to him; he spat their name from his mouth.
The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) Page 27