The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) (27 page)

Read The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) Online

Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn)
13.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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.”
E
verything 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.
“Carp
tos,” 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 Carp
tos, 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 Carp
tos.
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.
Some of them saw the Scythians pass by. They did not come out in greeting, offering hospitality as the Kelti would
have done. They merely stood beside their snug stone-and-timber huts and watched as the horsemen moved uneasily through their territory.
Even here, in this mountain wilderness, tales were told of the Scythians, and the inhabitants of the Carp
tos had no desire to challenge the warriors from the east. Leave them alone and let them pass by.
But the mountain dwellers watched, and saw. And sent runners to the next settlement to spread a warning.
As the Scythians followed a twisting route deeper into the mountains the stories that accompanied them grew more lurid, though they did not know it. All they knew was the uncomfortable feeling at the back of the neck, the raising of hackles that had begun shortly after they left the plains. The horses felt it, too, and were skittish and reluctant to graze when they were unsaddled in the evening. They would only snatch a few bites of the sparse grass that had survived the early frosts, then lift their heads and stand listening, ears flickering back and forth nervously.
They were being followed again.
Kazhak sat by the campfire at night and examined the heads of his arrows, running his thumb along the killing surface again and again, trying to take comfort from the sweetly vicious shape.
But perhaps the thing that followed them was not vulnerable to the triple-edged arrows of the Scythians. Basl and Dasadas said it was not. They claimed they were not afraid of it, but they had acquired much respect for the creature.
None of the Scythians admitted to fear. It was the mountains that made them tense and jumpy; the darkly glowering Carpatos, long the source of wild tales.
Kazhak slept with one eye open, his weapons within easy reach, and listened to the night sounds, the soughing of wind in the pine trees, the little droppings and rustlings and patterings of nocturnal activity. He noted particularly when those sounds ceased and an unnatural quiet descended on the glade where they had made their latest camp. After many long, hard days in difficult terrain, trying to follow the rivers and gorges
and avoid the higher peaks, they had at last reached the eastern slope of the Carp
tos, and Kazhak had expected to feel in a better mood with the final barrier behind them.
But he was not in a good mood. He was more anxious than ever, and the silence was nerve-wracking. He opened his eyes and looked around.
He saw Basl and Aksinya on watch, just beyond the campfire, and in the other direction he saw something move among the trees.
Kazhak sat up.
Epona was instantly awake, her hand on the hilt of her knife. She heard the silence, too.
Be strong,
she prayed without voice to the spirit of the iron in the knife; Goibban’s.iron.
If I have enemies, fight them courageously.
But there were no enemies to be seen. The thing that had flickered among the trees had disappeared.
“Was a man,” Kazhak told her, but without conviction.
She removed her hand from the knife hilt.
The morning dawned without sunlight. A pale gray mist enshrouded the landscape and the party of horsemen moved through it like a troop of ghosts, at times scarcely visible to one another. They were mounted again, Epona behind Kazhak. The horses shied at everything that moved; even a branch stirred by the wind frightened them. Epona bent down and stroked the gray stallion’s flanks, soothing him, so he behaved better than the others, but his eyes rolled in his head and he snatched at the bit, wanting to run.

Other books

Dark Nights by Kitti Bernetti
Florian by Felix Salten
Cafe Babanussa by Karen Hill
Tent City by Van Hull , Kelly
Contact by A. F. N. Clarke
Betrayed by Trust by Hogan, Hailey
What Happens in Vegas: A BWWM Alpha Male Romance by Stacey Mills, Cristina Grenier
A Spy's Honor by Russell, Charlotte