Dasadas was not so sure. He kept his Kelti iron close to his hand, and when they heard distant animal sounds in the night he was instantly on his feet, staring into the darkness. “Since Dasadas drank the blood of first man he killed,” he confided to Epona, “according to our custom, no enemy has escaped the bow of Dasadas for long. Except that wolf.”
“It is not to your discredit that you could not kill him,” Epona said as she tried to reassure Dasadas. “As Kazhak said, the silver wolf is a … demon.”
“Have not killed him yet,” Dasadas corrected her. “But someday. Someday.”
The bleak reaches of the Sea of Grass lay behind them, and so far they had avoided pursuit or challenge. As they crossed the Tyras—seasoned travelers now, with many days in the saddle behind them—Dasadas looked north, upriver, and shuddered. “If we follow Tyras to land of Neuri we will be again in the Carptos,” he said. “Demon wolf waits for us there; Dasadas is sure of it. Wolf was very strong in Carpatos, Epona, remember? Remember? But we fool him; we go another way.”
That night, when they camped, Dasadas cried aloud in his sleep, and it was not the groan of a man but the whimper of a frightened child, with a nightmare it could not shake.
Slowly, reluctantly, Epona raised her head and listened. The pathetic sounds continued. She got up—one step at a time, ready to go back at any moment if they ceased—and went to Dasadas, where he lay wrapped in his blanket, sobbing in his sleep. She lay down beside him as gently as the fall of snow and put her arms around him.
“It’s all right, Dasadas,” she whispered in his ear. “It is only a dream, the wolf no longer follows us. There is nothing to fear that you cannot handle with your bow and arrows.”
She had to talk a long time before she felt him start to relax. His sleeping body burrowed against hers, seeking warmth, and she let herself mold to fit him. They lay together throughout the night with their arms around one another, and when Epona awoke at dawn his gray eyes were open.
“You are in my blanket,” he said in a low voice.
“You cried out in the night.”
“Dasadas never cries out in the night. You came to me; Dasadas always knew you would.” His arms clamped around her.
She did not want him; she wanted no one but Kazhak; yet Kazhak was many days away. She might never see him again. He had put her in Dasadas’ care, surely knowing the price the other man would demand. Indeed, for her sake Dasadas had left his own wives, his tents and wagons and people, to make the dangerous trip to the Blue Mountains, where he might well receive a hostile welcome. A debt had been incurred.
And she was sorry for Dasadas. It was not desire that rose up in her, but the vast mothering pity of a woman for a frustrated child. A child sick with longing for something it could never possess.
I am not Kazhak’s wife, she thought. I am a free woman.
Closing her eyes so she need not see his face, Epona gave what comfort she could to Dasadas.
He knew he had been cheated. He knew it almost at once, when the excitement faded and he realized he had only possessed her body, but not the essential inner something that fueled his hunger. Still, the prize had surrendered to him at last, he thought; the quarry had been brought to earth. It was something. It would be more. Somehow, he would make it more.
They rode on, and at night, when he could bear it no longer, he came to her. Though not every night; it was too painful to lie beside her and know that her thoughts were far away. It was agony to hear her whisper Kazhak’s name in her sleep.
They rode on.
As they approached the seacoast the climate became more benign, and there were times when Epona forgot her disguise and bared her head to the welcome sun.
“You must not!” Dasadas warned her, again and again. “Traders—Dacians, Ionians, Assyrians—they would take you for slavery and kill Dasadas. Or we might meet savages. The Tauri live on the seacoast; they would do terrible things to you.”
But they did not encounter savages. They found themselves riding almost from village to village, following a chain of settlements that encircled the sea like the globules of amber Epona never took from her throat. For the first time, she saw some of the long-settled towns the traders had described around Toutorix’s feasting fire. Many of them were mere clusters of mud-brick houses, surrounded by fenced patches of farmland; but as they neared the mouth of the Duna the signs of man’s long occupation of this region were expressed by actual cities, centers of commerce dictated by the location of good harbors for merchant ships or adequate facilities for metalworking, the preoccupation of the region.
Cities had streets paved with blocks of stone rutted by many generations of wooden wagon wheels. Cities had more people than Epona had ever seen in one place, until the winter encampment of the Scythians. Cities had noise and dirt and unfamiliar smells, and offal that stood in the streets instead of being buried in squatting pits. Cities radiated an aura of anxiety.
Cities disgusted Epona.
“You are always asking questions,” Dasadas teased her. “Would you like to spend some days in city, see what is like?”
“No,” she told him without hesitation.
She was more interested in the sea, that vast body of water men called Black, glimpsed across stretches of beach or between trees. “Let us ride over there, Dasadas,” she implored. “I want to know what the sea looks like. I want to get off and wade in the shallows; I want to taste the water on my tongue.”
“Is not good thing to do,” Dasadas said. “Sea is full of monsters. You will be eaten; Kazhak will blame Dasadas.”
He could not control her, however; stronger men had tried. He watched, glowering, while she satisfied her curiosity about the sea and ran back from incoming wavelets, squealing with delight. Each squeal brought his hand closer to the hilt of his shortsword, but no monster materialized to attack her.
Epona was entranced by the sea. Giant, liquid, ceaseless; it was like some incredibly large womb, gestating life in its darkness. She felt an answering within herself.
“Perhaps we should stay here until spring, Dasadas,” she suggested, half-seriously. “I have a feeling this would be a good place to bear a child.”
“Child? Child!”
She smiled, her eyes full of dreams. “Yes.”
“Is my child?”
She hated having to kill the hope she heard in his voice. But a child must not begin with a lie. “No, Dasadas; it was sired by Kazhak, on the Sea of Grass.”
“You are certain?”
She put one hand to her waist, feeling the ripeness there, surprised he had not already noticed. “Hai, Dasadas. Very certain.” A child with dark eyes, and an irresistible grin, waited in her womb. Her arms shaped themselves unconsciously into a cradle to hold it. Dasadas saw the gesture and turned away.
“We go,” he said. “Would not be a good place to have a child. We are strangers here. You should be with your own people.”
She thought of the endless distance stretching ahead of them, the towns they must pass, the marshland, the dusty roads, the rivers to cross and hills to climb. The other great plain that still lay between her and the Blue Mountains. And the mountains themselves, rising sheerly toward the sky in almost unclimbable steps.
“I don’t know if we can reach the village of the Kelti before this child is born,” she told Dasadas.
“We try. Kazhak would want.” He kicked the bay stallion and started forward at a trot, anxious to be moving, to lose himself in the rhythm of the horse, which he understood. He could not understand Epona. She was as incomprehensible to him as the stars. She must have known she carried Kazhak’s child when she lay in his blanket with him that first time; yet she had said nothing, as if it did not matter … he felt betrayed, and angry for Kazhak, whom Epona had also betrayed.
It did not matter, to Epona. With Kazhak’s child safe inside her, part of her, its spirit added to her own, she felt everything else become secondary. She rode as if in a dream, experiencing the wonder o
f being part of creation, a lifebearer. All her senses were simultaneously intensified and sweetened, so that tastes were richer, sounds clearer, sights more colorful than she had ever known. She felt a generous outpouring of herself that extended to everything she came in contact with, even while her thoughts and her concentration turned inward, to the child.
She could be kind to Dasadas, it did not matter. Kazhak’s child was safe within her; he was her husband now, in truth, and the small pleasure she gave to Dasadas did not diminish Kazhak. The man was brave and loyal, a good warrior. He was just not large enough in her eyes to blot out the vision of Kazhak.
But she wanted to leave the region of cities; there was something unclean about them that must not touch her unborn child.
Now that he knew about the child, Dasadas changed. He withdrew into himself like a woman going behind her veil, and he quit talking to Epona aside from the most necessary exchanges. He did not come to her at night, with pleading hands and hungry body. He looked at her almost as if he hated her, which puzzled her. In the village of the Kelti, a woman carrying life was admired by everyone.
As they approached the estuary of the Duna, Dasadas remarked that they would need to hire a ferryman to take them across the river ahead on a flat-bottomed barge, for it was too wide to ford and too deep and swift to swim the horses. The ferryman would cost some of their gold.
“Why do we have to cross the Duna here at all?” Epona asked. “Why not follow the north bank, inland?”
“Dasadas planned to go beyond river, south, to city of Varna. Buy supplies there, maybe find some brothers who came to Thrace for horsetrading. Pick up an escort for part of journey.”
“I don’t want to go to Varna, Dasadas, and I need no more escort than you.”
“Woman with child is helpless.”
She still dressed as a Scythian man, unwilling to relinquish the comfort and convenience of her trousers. She rode as well as ever, and the day before she had brought down a fat heron with her bow. She did not feel helpless. “No escort!” she ordered. “And I want to save our gold; as we cross Thrace, we will spend it instead for good big mares.”
“For why?”
“With Thracian mares in addition to our Kelti ponies, we can be breeding bigger horses sooner. We can find other ways to pay for supplies, if we need them; you can split wood for a farmer with no sons, or I can gather and sell herbs. But I mean to take some Thracian mares to the Blue Mountains, for with them, and the methods of training I learned on the Sea of Grass, I will be able to see my own kin become horsemen within this lifetime. I can mount Kazhak’s son on his own horse and put the reins in his hand, Dasadas.” Her eyes were shining. But the magic was not for him. Would never be for him.
Dasadas felt he had grabbed for stars and caught a handful of dust.
His voice was surly as he answered. “We two alone could never drive a band of mares all the way to your village. Why you want to try this?”
She paused a moment, thinking. “So I can go home with my head high,” she said at last.
It was not difficult to find people willing to sell them good mares; they were riding through a country that prided itself on its breeding stock, and every farmer boasted of his year’s crop of foals. But Epona insisted on those animals with the deepest chest and the sturdiest leg bones; good lungs and tendons not easily torn would be essential in the mountains. Soon they had spent their little hoard of gold, and the only wealth they had left for trade was the metal on their horse trappings and the amber around Epona’s neck.
In return for a dun mare with powerful hindquarters Epona traded the amber necklace without regret; her belly carried a far better remembrance of Kazhak.
As Dasadas had foreseen, there were numerous difficulties for two people in trying to drive a band of mares many days across difficult terrain. The stallions Epona and Dasadas rode did not make matters easier. They constantly pranced at the very edge of control, displaying themselves for their new harem, all but forgetting the riders who cursed and struggled in an effort to keep them looking ahead and moving forward. The gray, older and better trained, gave Epona fewer difficulties than Dasadas’ young and impetuous bay; but both horses obviously considered their riders secondary in importance to the mares.
The mares, the mares. Nine young mares, with untold generations in their bellies; on their backs.
The weather was less of a problem. Each night, when they camped, Epona spent a long time in concentration over the campfire they never failed to build now. She chanted invocations to the clouds and the wind; she bent low to the earth mother and murmured words of praise. She treated the fire with respect and hailed trees they passed with gestures of love.
They rode through a calm land and a gentle season, and Dasadas grieved in his heart for the magic he would never be able to grasp.
The woman’s belly was swelling richly now, and at the end of each day there were dark circles under her eyes where exhaustion lay. “We should stop,” Dasadas told her again and again. They were following the valley of the Duna northward, aware of the great mountain ranges that lay east and west. They were safely past the unhealthy marshlands of Moesia now, into the rich and fertile valley through which many generations of traders had made their way north to the Baltik. There were well-beaten roads, prosperous farms, frequent settlements. There were tribes whose names Epona knew: the Daci, the Scordisci, the Breuci. But Epona refused to break their journey and await the arrival of her infant in some comfortable haven.
“I want to go all the way,” she said stubbornly, and there was no arguing with her.
To avoid seeing the pain in his eyes, she did not discuss her reasons with Dasadas until he became so insistent she had no choice. “Kazhak may have had to flee the tribe by now,” she said. “The odds against him were so great, Dasadas; but I do not think he would wait meekly for the shamans to sacrifice him. He may be riding west himself. If he comes to my village I must be there first, or it could go hard with him.”
“We never see Kazhak again,” Dasadas told her with certainty. “We should not even say his name; to say names of dead draws their attention, they could hurt us.”
“Hai, Dasadas, you know nothing,” Epona said softly. “Kazhak is not dead. And the spirits of those who have made their transition are not necessarily our enemies; Kazhak would not be. But he is not dead,” she repeated.
“How you know?”
She put her hand on her belly. “I know.”
She thought she knew; the feeling was strong in her, but there were times of doubt, nevertheless. She lay on the earth at night and remembered the words of Uiska: “It takes much courage to look into the future, and some of the things to be seen there would scorch your eyes.” But she was drui; she had the power. If she truly believed, she could visit the future and see if it was inhabited by a living Kazhak.
Remember the other words of Uiska, counseled the spirit within:
Learning to resist temptation is part of the discipline of the druii.
Yes, Epona agreed silently. The shamans had not resisted the temptation to abuse their power and reach out with greedy hands, and only ill would come of it. Whatever pattern governed the lives of the Scythians would be damaged beyond repair, made into something warped and ugly.
But that was not her concern. Her concern was her own tribe. Her people. Her people forever; and she and her baby were going home.
The way was long and hard, but her heart was singing in her every step of it. She felt guided as if by unseen hands. She was as buoyant as though she floated on water. At last she was conforming to the pattern as it pertained to her, and all things would go smoothly now.
She was going home.
They drove the mares to a shallow backwater of the river for grazing and watering, and even as Dasadas and Epona were unsaddling their own horses, they knew they had made a mistake, but it was too late.
The war party came swarming over the crest of a wooded hill and had them surrounded almost before they
could put arrows to their bows.
Chapter 31
They were Dacians, by the looks of them: hardmuscled, fair-haired men armored with bronze corselets and carrying javelins in addition to their shorts-words. Epona’s first reaction was relief that they were not one of the hybrid bands of robbers that plagued the trade routes, preying on insufficiently guarded merchants.
That relief ebbed quickly. A long-jawed man wearing the plume of leadership on his bronze helmet pointed at her and yelled, “That’s the one, that’s the Kelti woman!” and the others ran toward her.
She and Dasadas worked frantically, fitting arrow to bow and firing as quickly as they could, accurate shots that took down a man with every singing of the bow. But they were outnumbered, and almost a score of Dacians reached Epona and Dasadas, grabbing at the bridles of their horses. They fought hard, with knife and sword now, but Epona was clumsy in her pregnancy and even Dasadas was soon overpowered, though he fought like a man possessed.
Their little herd of mares, spooked by the furor, stampeded up the road and was soon out of sight.
The leader hauled a shaken Epona off her horse. Too late, she regretted that she had not given the gray stallion the kill signal that would have set him lashing out with teeth and hooves at the enemy. It was almost as if the unborn life within her held her back from such close-quarter killing.
“This has to be the woman,” the leader crowed in triumph. As two of his men held her he snatched the felt cap from her head and let her hair tumble free. “Reddish-blond and big with child,” he said, with satisfaction. “She answers the description that farmer gave us.”
“What farmer? What is this about?” Epona demanded to know. She would not let them see her be afraid.
“You healed the lame pony of a man who gave you food and water in return, and held some mares for you in his pen,” the Dacian told her. “And that farmer talked, oh, yes, he was delighted to talk. You made quite an impression on him.”
As her pregnancy advanced, her disguise as a Scythian man had became quite impossible, and Epona had recently, reluctantly, abandoned it altogether. Now it was too late for regrets, however. Someone would have spotted her anyway, she knew that as soon as the Dacian explained his reason for seeking her.
The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) Page 44