The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn)

by Llywelyn, Morgan

  When Epona casually mentioned Samhain Ro-An listened at first, but after a few moments she reacted with such alarm that Epona quickly changed the subject, out of pity. The Scythians had been taught that all spirits were malevolent; the idea of an easy passage between the spirit lands and the world of the living was unbearable to them. Epona talked brightly of other things, of food and clothes and the gossip of the wagons, and Ro-An seemed to relax and forget.

  But Epona’s blood did not forget. Soon it would be Samhain, and the rituals must be observed.

  The first step, at sundown on the eve of Samhain, should be the extinguishing of old fires and the kindling of new. But Epona had no old lodgefire to extinguish, and no gutuiter to light a new one. The druii taught that an old fire must be given an honorable death by water and earth and water again, according to exactly prescribed ritual, the essential spirits mingling, each action thorough and precise.

  Epona had observed that the Scythians had no comprehension of such a balancing of the elements. When they wanted to put out a fire on one of their open cooking hearths they carelessly kicked it to death, or dumped offal on it. Then, when great prairie fires swept across the Sea of Grass, killing game and trapped livestock and reducing precious grazing land to scorched earth, they did not know why.

  Wood was scarce on the steppe. There was very little for wagons and tent frames, and fires were customarily fueled with animal dung or fat-filled bones. Yet the Scythians did nothing to propitiate the spirits of the trees. If they came across a rare seedling, fighting for its precarious existence, they might deliberately stamp on it for the pleasure of seeing something die. A member of the Kelti would have built a little stone wall around it as a protection for its infancy, and offered a prayer to the earth mother to keep it safe, and to the spirit of the rain to nourish it.

  The Scythians did not concern themselves with the shortage of timber on the arid plains. When all the resources of one area were exhausted, they merely packed their tents onto their wagons and moved on.

  Take and go.

  Using a few live coals she had begged from one of the Scythian cooking fires, Epona had built a small blaze in a stone-lined firepit she constructed for herself just outside the entrance to her tent. She did not want this particular fire hidden within felt walls, though the smoke-flap would have allowed enough ventilation to keep it alive. This fire should be free, in the open air; in that way it somehow felt closer to the spirits of her people.

  For several days she collected water for the ritual extinguishing, a little at a time. The Scythians, who rationed and measured every drop on the arid plains, would be furious if she wasted good drinking water on a fire, so she hid her ration in her mouth and when no one was looking she spat it into a jar. Soon she was tormented by thirst, but she chewed on some of Kazhak’s survival weed and saved the water. There must be enough for the ritual, whatever the cost to herself.

  So said the spirit within, and now she listened.

  She brought fistfuls of earth and stored it under the rugs that made her bed, grieving in her heart for the familiar soil of the earth mother as she had known it in the Blue Mountains. This dirt was alien; taste, touch, smell were all unfamiliar, but it was the best she had.

  Samhain eve was marked by a sunset of blood red and burnished gold, and a respite from the shrieking of a daylong wind. Ragged banners of cloud rippled across the sky, waving farewell to the light.

  Alone by her firepit, with no help from anyone, Epona strove to keep the ancient harmonies alive.

  She watched in a fever of excitement as the sun sank below the rim of the grassland. As the sun died the fire must also die, and be born again under the benevolent gaze of the North Star. She had just completed the ritual extinguishing when she heard Kazhak’s voice and saw him coming toward her with a familiar glint in his eye and a broad smile, obviously intending to enjoy a pleasant evening.

  But the ritual could not be abandoned.

  Bracing herself, she began trying to explain it to Kazhak and make him understand the necessity for allowing her to follow through to the end of the ceremony. At first he seemed puzzled and almost angry, believing this to be some sort of rejection. Then his interest was piqued and he started asking questions. Her replies amused him at first, until they made him uneasy.

  “This Samhain magic, it lets in spirits? Evil spirits will come into the tents of Kazhak?”

  “Not evil spirits, just beings who have another life than ours. But they are necessary to us; it is important that we show them the proper hospitality. At the death of the old cycle of seasons they are free to come and go as they please.”

  “Not on the Sea of Grass!” Kazhak interjected.

  “Everywhere. We have no power over such things. But if we show proper reverence and maintain the harmonies, we are quite safe.”

  “Kazhak knew you had strong magic,” the Scythian said.

  “It is more than magic,” Epona replied. “Our rituals are things we … feel, and we perform them to create symmetry. It is how we follow the pattern.”

  “What is this pattern?”

  How could she explain what she did not totally understand herself? What mutual language could she and Kazhak discover that might make clear to the Scythian those things the Kelt knew only through the voice of the spirit within and the singing in her blood?

  The first star was blazing in the sky, though threatened by a bank of purple cloud. Seeing it, Epona reached for the flints. Tena would not have needed firestones, she thought, striking them together to summon the new spark.

  When she was certain the infant fire would live, given strength by her invocations to the spirits of fire and air, she could pick up the thread of her conversation with Kazhak as she prepared for the next part of the ceremony, the feeding of a stone, bone of the earth mother, with sacrificial blood.

  Kazhak watched as she turned away from the new fire. His forehead wrinkled with the effort to understand. “Following a pattern,” he murmured. “Is that why you always turn this way”—waving his knife hand—“and never that way?”—gesturing to the cup hand.

  “That is one example, yes. If you face south, the stronghold of the sun, you will see that the sun always travels across the sky from your cup hand toward your knife hand. By turning our bodies in the same direction, we stay in harmony; we feel better when we are careful to turn toward the knife hand.”

  Epona was flattered that Kazhak had noticed this small detail of her behavior. But then he said, “All this magic is too complicated, too much to remember. Kazhak likes things simple.”

  “It is not too much to remember,” she argued. “The spirit within, once awakened, helps us.”

  “What is this spirit within? Is a demon?”

  Epona tried, then, to explain about the great fire of life and the spark from it contained in every living thing. She thought she saw a gleam of comprehension, quickly veiled, in his eyes, but she was disappointed in her own inability to find the words that would give him true understanding. She had not yet been trained to teach, nor had she bothered to memorize the explanations she had been given. I was always asking questions, she reminded herself, but I did not really listen to the answers.

  Kazhak watched curiously as she knelt before the symbolic stone she had set up to represent the goddess, the earth mother. He noticed for the first time the deep purple bruise in the bend of her elbow, where she had opened the vein with her knife and collected her own blood as her lips shaped the prayer to her ancestors—the ancestors still carried in that blood. She drizzled the blood over the stone, offering the fluid of life back to the mother, and whispered fragments of prayers recalled from past Samhains.

  Do not hurt us, stones. Stay fixed in your places and do not fall down on our heads, or rise in the night to attack us. We give you life freely; you do not need to take it by force.

  When the offering was completed she waited with bowed head and closed eyes, but the spirits of the ancestors did not speak to her here. She was to
o far from home. Whatever walked on Samhain had nothing to say to the Kelti woman who knelt in silent supplication.

  At last she drew a deep breath and opened her eyes. Kazhak was looking at her through lowered lids, and the light of her small fire cast golden shadows on his high cheekbones.

  She opened her arms to him then. It seemed a good way to complete the celebration of Samhain.

  They went together into the tent, and after their lifemaking Kazhak fell into a deep sleep beside her, and did not return to his own tent. The new little fire stayed alive outside in its carefully constructed firebed, crackling merrily to itself. It stood guard over the sleepers in the tent: a new fire, kindled in the harmonies, fresh and strong to turn away malign influences.

  In other tents, in wagons, rolled in their blankets, the people of the horse slept also. But not so soundly as Epona and Kazhak.

  At the darkest time of night a great stillness seemed to blanket the encampment. The horses and goats raised their heads and listened, moving about, uneasy. The people slept, also uneasy, for the quality of their dreams had changed.

  Spirits walked among them.

  In the morning, many of the Scythians would awake from broken sleep with red-rimmed eyes, eyes that still held the shadow of fear. If they had spoken to one another of their dreams, they would have discovered that many shared one dream, a dream of a huge pale wolf who padded into the camp on silent feet, yellow eyes glinting.

  The wolf had paced between the tents and wagons, sniffing the air. Its tongue lolled from its mouth. It had moved to the hardy men still sleeping under the stars, rolled in their blankets, and peered into the faces of the sleepers. In their dreams they saw him, but they could not move. They could not run. They lay sweating in terror as he blew his stinking hot breath on them and went on, from one to another, searching.

  At last, in their dreams, he came to the tent of Kazhak’s Kelti woman and stood on his hind legs, pawing at the felt covering on the side.

  The little fire near the entrance hissed a warning.

  The wolf sat down a few paces back from the tent and lifted his muzzle. On one long, wavering breath he sang the song of the wolves, a scalp-prickling howl of beauty and loneliness.

  The dreamers heard the howl. They clenched their fists and shuddered in their sleep.

  The cry died away on the rising night wind, and the wolf went with it, suddenly gone. But for the rest of the night no one slept well outside of Epona’s tent.

  Chapter 23

  A few days later the shamans sent for Epona. They had been in no hurry to question the girl, expecting she would reveal herself as powerless and a fraud by her actions in the encampment. To this end they had had her watched, but no one had been able to make a satisfactory report. The things she did were not comprehensible to the Scythians. She practiced some form of magic with the fire, that much was certain, and she rode out every day on a horse—like a man!—teaching herself to use bow and arrow. Aside from that, she was a mystery.

  The shamans smoked hemp and consulted the bones and one another, sensing a threat, jealous of their position, but unwilling to have the tribe or Kolaxais see that they assigned any importance whatsoever to the woman.

  Let her wait, cooling her heels like the women in beaded shoes, until they were ready and had nothing better to do but amuse themselves with her.

  When at last the messenger came to her tent to tell Epona the shamans would see her the next morning, the young woman felt suddenly, totally, on guard, like a warrior seeing the signal fires and hearing the battle trumpet.

  That night she said to Kazhak, “I am to be examined by your priests tomorrow. What would you have me do?”

  “Impress them,” Kazhak told her.

  “What can I do to impress them?”

  Kazhak shrugged his shoulders with impatience. This was not familiar ground to him, this business of magic. “You are healer; heal Kolaxais. Take away influence of shamans.”

  He is like a child, Epona thought. He thinks it is so simple because he does not understand all that is involved.

  Uiska had once said to her, “Seen from above, the lake is flat like a sheet of metal. You must look beneath the surface to understand the true nature of the lake.”

  “I am not trained in the healing arts,” Epona said aloud, “and even if there were something I could do for Kolaxais, the shamans would never let me get close enough to examine him and determine what is out of harmony in his body.”

  “Then do something else, but show them you have power, and remind them Kazhak has you. Is important, Epona. Is important.”

  His urgency communicated itself to the girl. She was his wife; it was her responsibility to help him in thislife, or she would accrue debts that must be paid in the next. “I will do the best I can,” she promised, with a confidence she did not feel.

  Epona awoke before dawn. Emerging from the tent, she went directly to her firepit and poked among the remnants of lastday’s fire for a live coal, safely hidden in the banked ashes. When thisday’s fire was burning she felt somewhat comforted, warmed by the greeting of the friendly spirit.

  She dressed in what little finery she possessed and set out for the tent of the shamans, but she had gone only a few paces when she stopped in her tracks. A tree branch lay exactly in line with the path she must take, blown there by the wind, perhaps, but there were no trees from horizon to horizon from which it might have come.

  The branch was bent halfway along its length like a broken arm, and at its end, one twig pointed a threatening finger toward Epona.

  She sucked in her breath and squinted at the omen, feeling the swirl of invisible forces around her. Was this the doing of the shamans, or of other, more powerful but as yet unguessed spirits? She was a stranger in this place; she might already have made enemies she did not know.

  She had hoped to have a final word with Kazhak this morning before her ordeal, but she glimpsed him in the distance, riding with the other horsemen in search of game, thoroughly involved in his own business.

  What would be done, she must do for herself.

  First, however, she needed the small satisfaction of an ally, a word with a friend, a warmth passed between kindred spirits. She turned toward the hobbled saddle horses held within the circle of tents and wagons.

  Kazhak’s gray stallion was among them. This morning the Scythian had taken a bay gelding he was training, a leggy animal with a vicious streak that would make him a valuable war-horse if they ever encountered the Cimmerians again. The gray, whose training was complete and dependable, was left in the encampment.

  The stallion lifted his head and nickered a greeting as Epona approached.

  She put her arms around the stallion’s neck and pressed her cheek to his skin, furred now with its winter protection. He smelled good. He felt strong and sure. She inhaled deeply, trying to draw some of his assurance into her troubled-self.

  The gray horse fidgeted, pawing the earth and swinging his hindquarters away from her. When Epona raised her head and looked at him she saw a familiar tension in his body, making the muscles stand out in sharp relief in spite of his heavy coat. His eyes had a certain glint; his ears flicked with a particular nervousness she had seen before. His were the actions of a sensitive horse anticipating a bad storm.

  Yet the sky was cloudless, a bleak winter sky from horizon to horizon, containing only diluted light. There was no storm.

  The horse said there was.

  She pressed her body against his, trying to merge her thoughts with the wisdom of the horse. She dilated her nostrils as much as she could, scenting the wind as he did, searching out the first small hint of rain.

  There it was—still too faint to be noticed by anyone else, merely the echo of something very far away. In the encampment of the Scythians only Kazhak’s stallion suspected its presence. Only the stallion—and now Epona—were aware that the weather might change.

  She ran her hand lovingly down the stallion’s neck and whispered her thanks to
him.

  The shamans were waiting for her in their tent, attired in their ceremonial robes and painted faces. Two well-nourished hard-eyed men who did not let her sit down but had her stand in the center of the tent, penned between them, so she had to face first one way and then the other as they fired their questions at her, dividing the interrogation equally.

  She was always careful to turn toward the knife hand.

  They asked a few general questions about her tribe, then narrowed their interest down to the priests, demanding to know everything she could tell them of Kelti ritual and magic. They boasted to her of their ability as healers and described various ailments that they could treat, asking how the Kelti healers would have dealt with this or that sickness or injury. They wanted exact details, but when she told them what she knew they scoffed contemptuously.

  Tsaygas, the bo-han, or chief shaman, said, “Woman is ignorant woman knows nothing. Kelti know nothing. Illness is not caused by disharmony. Illness is caused by demon that enters man and tears away his breath or feeds on his body. Only shaman can fight this evil force. Only shamans sing the songs know the dances good shamans good taltos; white shamans white taltos sing the songs know the dances …”

  He flung himself into a whirling dance, the white horses’ tails swinging around his body, his hands slamming the priest drum hung around his neck on thongs. The other shaman joined him in a deafening monotone, discordant and painful to the ears.

  There was no harmony in them. No symmetry, no pattern.

  Epona stood without moving until the dance died of its own momentum, and the two men closed in on her once more with questions and denunciations. It was obvious they would not allow an open discussion and then arrive at a balanced judgment, as the tribal council of the Kelti judged. But what could one expect of these nomads who let a sick old man hold the reins of power instead of electing a strong young one? It was not surprising the shamans had usurped the power of the prince.