by Ilka Tampke
I placed the loaves in my basket. Even within my short remembering, the tendrils of Roman ways had touched Caer Cad. Aside from the pretty cups and the dark wines that filled them, there were new arts like coloured glass, oils from fruit, and different coins that served in trade. More and more barrow-loads of our lead and grain were carted out and rolled onto ships bound for the Empire. But the tribes had always been, and remained, the law-keepers of this land.
Rome’s army had come one hundred summers before and the eastern kings had defended their freedom with trade and terms. There was always talk that they would come again, that they would not be so easily withheld, but I was not afraid. Cookmother had taught me that the roots of the tribes reached deep and it would take more than Roman swords to dig them out.
I thanked Mael for the bread and he smiled at me through blackened teeth. ‘First time through the fires tonight?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘Then Mothers bless you.’ He chuckled and the knot tightened in my belly.
Outside, Neha sprang to her feet. Sun streamed over Sister Hill to the east. Already there were women busied at its crest, softening the ground for the poles and laying the offerings.
Of the year’s four great festivals, Beltane was the most beloved by the tribes. A night of fire, of joy, where the heat of man against woman broke open the winter, called back the sun and readied the ground for a strong, sweet harvest. For girls who had first bled since last Beltane, such as me, tonight would be their first union. I was twice seven summers.
Barking filled the air. Neha had galloped ahead. I ran after her, hoping she hadn’t bitten the wheelwright again.
When I rounded the corner I found her snarling at a young tribesman marking his fightcraft in the street. I pushed through the crowd around him and called Neha off. ‘I’m sorry,’ I panted, grabbing her scruff. ‘She’s not fond of strangers.’
He laughed. ‘She mistakes me then. I am no stranger to Cad.’
I stared at him. He was well cast, of medium height but heavily muscled, his beard lime-bleached in the style of the warrior. Despite the crisp morning, he practised without a shirt, his silver torque glinting on his shaved chest. He was familiar but I could not place him.
‘Are you returned from fosterage?’ I asked, hooking my unbraided hair behind my shoulders.
‘Ay.’ He sheathed his sword. ‘I am Ruther of Cad.’
Orgilos’s son. Often spoken of. Fostered to the east for fight-training, then to Rome to learn their soldier’s craft, he would have been almost twenty summers now.
I nodded. ‘Blessings upon your return.’ Neha growled under my firm grip. ‘Hush!’ I hissed. ‘Forgive her. She’s cursed with a wolf’s temper.’
‘And her mistress?’ He stared at me. ‘Is she so cursed?’
I answered with a brief smile, then pulled Neha and turned away.
‘Do you not offer your name?’
‘Ailia,’ I called over my shoulder.
‘Skin to Caer Cad?’
I stopped, wordless. It had been many summers since I had met this question.
In the silence, a woman’s voice called. ‘She’s unskinned, daughter only to the doorstep!’
My face burned. There were those who were angered by my place in the Tribequeen’s kitchen. Years of taunts had taught me to walk away without looking back, lest their spit wet my face.
‘Unskinned?’ said Ruther. ‘Yet you hold your head like a queen.’
‘Because she attends the queen’s kitchen,’ called another. ‘And the Cookwoman pets her like a house dog.’
I kept walking. Ruther was right to be surprised. Not often would one without skin move through the town so freely. A pebble struck my shoulder, hard and sharp. I stopped as the sting gave way to a warm ache and a trickle of blood down my back.
‘Cease!’ shouted Ruther into the crowd. ‘Do you strike a maiden’s back? And for nothing but an accident of birth? Do you still live in this darkness since I have been gone?’ He turned to me. ‘Go home, daughter of the doorstep,’ he said. ‘Be proud of your boldness.’
Before I turned the corner, I glanced back. Ruther had unsheathed his sword and was swiping and twisting it again to a tide of admiring murmurs. Who is he, I wondered, who cares so little for the laws of skin?
‘Handsome, isn’t he?’ said a townswoman as she passed.
‘If your tastes are such,’ I answered.
‘He thought you sweet enough.’
As I hurried home, I saw the thick smoke of the fringe fires coiling above the town walls.
Just beyond the southern gate, wedged along the lower banks of the ramparts, was a tight-packed warren of stick huts and hide tents, foul with littered bone scraps and poor drainage. These were the fringes. Home to the skinless. Shunned by the tribe.
Summer was strong in deer spirit. Except for those who had travelled or married in—bringing with them skins of the owl, wolf or the river—most born here were skin to the deer.
Born to the skinless, or lost to their families before naming, the unskinned were not claimed by a totem. Their souls were fragmented, unbound to the Singing. If they remained little seen, they were not despised, not usually harmed. The townspeople gave them enough grain, cloaks and work, if they would do it. But they could not live within the town walls because no one could be sure of who they were.
I quickened my pace and Neha trotted beside me.
Skin was gifted from mother to child by a song.
I had no mother. I had no skin.
But I had been spared. Just.
‘Who cast the stone?’ spat Cookmother, dabbing an ointment of comfrey on my back.
In the quiet of the kitchen, I sat between my worksisters on a long log bench draped with pelts. We held bowls of bread soaked in goat’s milk and huddled close to the hearthstones as the morning sun had not yet warmed the thick walls of our roundhouse.
‘I did not see.’ I winced as Cookmother covered my wound.
‘I’ll strangle them with their own innards if I learn of it.’ She lifted my dress back onto my shoulders, and I leaned against her warm bulk. It was by Cookmother’s insistence alone that I remained in the Tribequeen’s kitchen.
As we ate, I told the girls of the Great Bear’s death, and of my meeting with Ruther.
‘It is said he can match twenty Romans with his sword,’ said Ianna, her wide eyes blinking.
‘More likely to share their wine and whores, I’ve heard,’ said Cah.
‘Speak not against Orgilos’s son in my kitchen, thanks be,’ said Cookmother, stirring the fire pot.
Bebin rose and took up a flame to light the torches. ‘Was there another returned with him?’ she asked.
‘Who could you mean?’ jibed Cah.
We all knew she spoke of Uaine, also fostered to the east. She had awaited his return for three summers.
‘He was alone,’ I murmured.
Bebin turned away and my heart fell.
‘Uaine will be schooled to a high warrior now,’ said Cah. ‘He will set his sights beyond a kitchen girl when he returns.’
I could have struck her with a fire iron, but I knew Bebin had more sense than to listen to Cah.
Bebin walked the curved room, igniting the torches, each one revealing more of the swirling red circles that marked our walls. She lit only the kitchen’s eastern half—the realm of the living—where the floor and shelves were crammed with baskets, grindstones, grainpots and buckets. The western half, where our beds were laid, was the place of the dead and must remain always in darkness.
‘Empty your bowls, Cah, Ianna,’ snapped Cookmother. ‘It is time for your lessons.’
Cah groaned.
‘What was that?’ said Cookmother. ‘Rather wash out the shit trough, would you?’ She reached over and snatched Cah’s bowl.
‘I had not finished,’ said Cah.
‘You have now. Get your cloak.’
Bebin smiled as she caught my eye. Four years my elder, she had finished h
er schooling, but every morning except wane days and feast days, Cah and Ianna, both my age, were still expected to go to the shrine, where learners gathered before dispersing to the rivers or to the craft huts for schooling.
I followed them to the door and watched them walk off, laughing. Learning was wasted on both of them. Ianna had no brains for it and Cah had no gratitude. They had no idea of their privilege. I would have cut off my first finger to be in their place for just one summer. But I was not permitted to go with them or hear any talk of what they learned. It was forbidden for the unskinned to be taught.
Neha nosed my hand. I squatted beside her and buried my fingers in the swathe of white fur around her neck. She was not a large dog—her shoulder only at my knee when I stood—but her carriage was proud. She turned her snout to meet my caress. Her face was unusually marked—half-grey, half-white in perfect division—but it was her eyes that drew the most curiosity: the one belonging to the white side was ice-blue, the other brown. It gave her an eerie, lopsided stare that, combined with her wary temper, many felt marked her as a friend to the dark spirits. But I knew her soul was true and I had taken many years of comfort from her odd-eyed gaze.
‘Come, Ailia,’ called Cookmother from the hearth. ‘Fraid will be ready for her bath and you know she does not like to wait.’
3
Names
The moon has a name—a Mother’s name—
but it is too powerful to say.
We say only brightness or light of the night.
We are too small to say its true name.
A name. A soul. They are the same.
I PUT DOWN the brimming water bucket and struck the bell at the Tribequeen’s outer door. Although I had passed this threshold daily since I had turned twelve, it still made my belly flutter. I paused at the inner door and she called me through.
Inside, the air was heavy with birch smoke and the scent of the walnut oil she rubbed in her hair. She sat, straight-backed, on a stool by the fire. Dressed only in her linen night-tunic, without the layers of bracelets and neckrings that marked her as our leader, she looked pale and thin.
I was one of the few permitted to see her un-metalled, but I never forgot that she was Fraid, unchallenged Tribequeen of Northern Durotriga, skin to the deer. She carried the nimble wit of her totem and enough of its caution as well. Few tribeswomen rose to rule but Fraid had a stomach for it that her brothers did not, and the shelves lining the walls were laden with gifts—carvings and jewels—that bore testament to the bonds she had wrought with our neighbouring tribes.
‘Come,’ she said.
I could not read her face as I walked toward her. Her high brow was smoother, more innocent, than one would expect of a woman who had borne the weight of a tribe for twenty summers. Yet usually I could detect the twitch of the lip, the lift of the jaw, which told me if matters in the tribe were not well. Today I could not.
I glanced at her bed. No warrior lay within, though she had taken many since her husband had fallen to fever last midwinter. The bed of her brother, Fibor, was also empty and her youngest daughter, Manacca—seven summers old and the only one yet to be fostered away—had torn past as I returned from the well. Fraid was alone.
Yet when I drew closer, I was startled to see Llwyd the Journeyman, sitting motionless on the carved bench to Fraid’s right. Her concern must have been great to call her highest advisor before she was properly cloaked.
Clutching the bucket, I bowed deeply.
‘Quickly, Ailia,’ said Fraid. ‘I’m poorly slept and hungry.’
I pulled a bowl from the shelf and ladled it full of the barley porridge bubbling on the hearth. Etaina, Fibor’s wife, must have prepared it before she left. ‘Might I serve you food also, Journeyman?’
‘Nay, I fast for the rites.’ Llwyd smiled at me. Rarely did I see him outside of Ceremony or council. He wore the bone-coloured cloth of all journeymen Elders and, where it parted at his shoulder, I saw the mark of the deer scarred and dyed into his upper arm. His beard was the colour of pewter and his brown irises were misty with age, but the creases in his face showed there had been laughter in him. There was laughter still.
The journeypeople were those who had travelled many years in their learning. They were our teachers, our law-keepers, our ears to the Mothers. They knew how to travel the dream states, the trances, from which they saw what was true.
I unhooked the cookpot and placed it on the hearthstones. Then I hung an empty cauldron, filled it with wash-water, and sat down at Fraid’s feet.
‘This death will hasten an attack, I am sure of it,’ Fraid said to Llwyd between mouthfuls. ‘Not only because it makes cracks in our leadership, but because Caradog speaks so provocatively against Rome.’ She sighed.
‘He has always spoken so,’ answered Llwyd.
‘Yes, but he had his father to blunt his words.’
‘True,’ Llwyd nodded. ‘Belinus was an artful leader, equally skilled with word and sword. But Caradog has his own strengths. He is a tribesman, a lover of our Albion.’ His voice had the warmth of a long-burned fire.
Fraid placed her bowl on the bench beside her. ‘Do you suggest that we offer an alliance with Caradog? Should I send an envoy to pledge our fighting men and our coinage?’
Llwyd glanced at me and I turned back to the fire, embarrassed that he had caught me listening. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You have worked hard to protect the independence of this tribe.’
‘Caradog may seek to bring us into an alliance by force,’ said Fraid. ‘After all, he already controls the tribes on three sides of Durotriga.’
‘Caradog will seek to subdue the tribes whose leaders hold Roman sympathies,’ said Llwyd, ‘and that, good Tribequeen, is not us.’
I unhooked the simmering pot and poured the steaming water into a clay bowl, sweetening it with a pinch of dog-rose from a pot on Fraid’s shelf.
She winced at the heat as her feet slid in. ‘Nevertheless it will not hurt to keep the tradelines strong. After Beltane, I will send an envoy with new samples. I will send the knave Ruther.’
I glanced up as I rubbed her feet with a slippery slab of tallow.
‘Why him?’ asked Llwyd. I could not read the tone that had darkened his voice.
‘He’s been Roman-taught. He knows their ways. Perhaps he can help smooth what Caradog upsets.’
‘Be at peace, Fraid,’ said Llwyd, lightening again. ‘Caradog is a man of fire, but he is fuelled by love of the Mothers. If he leads us to war with Rome it will be an honourable war.’
‘But can we win such a war?’
Llwyd paused. ‘We will win it if the Mothers desire it.’
‘We will win it if our armies are strong enough,’ said Fraid.
I looked to her. It was not her way to speak so irreverently.
Llwyd frowned.
‘Forgive me,’ Fraid sighed. ‘It is only my worry speaking. But I cannot share your good faith, Journeyman. The messengers have long spoken that the fool Emperor Claudius searches for glory. The Romans are awaiting the right moment to strike, and this time they will not allow themselves to fail.’
As I dried Fraid’s feet, I could not tell if it was her words or Beltane nerves that made my belly clench. I loosened her night braid, setting her dark hair tumbling down her back. As I retied it, the pulse in her neck throbbed under my fingers.
‘You speak freely in front of this girl.’ Llwyd stared at me.
‘She can be trusted,’ Fraid said. ‘What do you think, Ailia? How will we fare under another Roman attack?’
My mouth fell open in surprise. I knew nothing of statecraft or the arts of war. I could not read omens in the night sky or the spilled innards of a slain lamb. I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
Fraid laughed. ‘Of course you don’t. It is festival eve, not the time for such questions.’ She turned to Llwyd. ‘I will speak on this with the council when the fires have burned down.’ She held out her fingers to be cleaned and I gathered my sticks and brushes.
It was a mark of shame for nails to be ragged or dirty and I was the only one she permitted to tend them.
Fraid was bold in keeping me as her attendant. She chose me because she liked my touch and she said that, of all the girls, I was the most at ease with a woman of power.
I was fortunate beyond words. Privileged in ways others without skin can only dream of.
Why was it not enough?
I walked down to the well near the southern gate, murmuring thanks to the Mothers before I cast my bucket into the long, dark drop.
The passage from womb to world was only half a birth—the body’s birth. Our souls were born when we were plunged, as babes, into river water, screaming at the cold shock of it, given our name and called to skin.
Deer. Salmon. Stone. Beetle. The North wind. Skin was our greeting, our mother, our ancestors, our land. Nothing existed outside its reach.
Beyond skin there was only darkness. Only chaos.
Because I was without skin I could not be plunged or named. I was half-born, born in body but not in soul. Born to the world but not to the tribe. I could never marry lest skin taboos were unknowingly betrayed. Deer did not marry well to owl. Owl to oak. At Ceremony I had to be silent, and keep to the edges. For where would I stand? What would I chant?
I lived with these losses, but the one that hollowed my chest was that I was not permitted to learn. All learning began and ended with the songs of skin. I ached to learn. Weaponcraft, oak-lore, the knowledge of the stars. I hungered for the poems that brought shape to this world of earth and water—the hardworld—and mapped the spirit places of the Mothers’ realm. Poems that told us what had come before, what made a life right and true.
I pulled up the bucket brimming with water from deep in the mountain.
When Fraid gave me my freedom, I would find my family. I did not know how, but there would be a way. I would find my birthplace, my kin and my skinsong, and then I would be able to learn.