The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) (35 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn)
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“No no, is right. Men and women cannot live together without trouble.”
“In the Blue Mountains …” she began.
“This is Sea of Grass,” he interrupted, and she bit off her words and regarded him silently, but without capitulation. “As for cooking,” Kazhak continued, “you are person of power, should not be seen cooking. Shamans have no respect for ordinary woman, must see from start that you are not ordinary.” He flashed his sudden grin. “Is true, Epona. You are not like other women.”
“If I am not to be treated like other women then why can’t I live in your tent?”
“Aaannh!” Kazhak threw up his hands. This was why men and women must live apart: to avoid such questions, such arguments. How could he take this female into his tent, his private place, for himself to rest in and entertain his brothers, and open himself up to her way of thinking and her questions?
“Because is not possible!” he thundered, turning on his heel and striding from the tent, anxious to get outside, to his horse. Epona watched through the entrance flap as he saddled the gray stallion and vaulted gracefully onto its back. He was Kazhak; he preferred being on top a fine, fast horse to being anyplace else. Secure in his saddle at last, he rode around the camp, issuing orders at the wagons of his women, and soon Ro-An hurried toward Kazhak’s tent to collect the leavings of his dawn meal and bring them to Epona.
At her insistence, Ro-An stayed to keep her company while she ate, and Epona questioned her about Kazhak’s other
women, and his children. Ro-An’s answers were punctuated with giggles, and sometimes the two women could not understand one another at all, when some word eluded them or some concept familiar to one was beyond the grasp of the other. But Epona listened, and learned.
She learned that the children had no training, and ran wild like animals, free to imitate their elders or not as they saw fit. They were given whatever they wanted and otherwise ignored, once they were old enough to leave their mothers’ tents. No bard taught them history, no skilled young woman with fast reflexes taught them to use knife and javelin. Kazhak’s four women had nine children among them—nine, a good symmetrical number—and five more had died. Ro-An as yet had not conceived, and now that Epona had joined the Scythians, she did not expect to bear a child for quite some time.
“Kazhak will use you most,” she told Epona. “He is like that, very odd. When he gets new woman he goes to her only for long time, does not share himself like some other men.”
“Have you had other men?”
Ro-An emitted a little shriek of horror. “No! Would be strangled and body thrown out for vultures, not even buried. Woman must look at no man but husband, ever.”
“Yet the men have more than one woman,” Epona pointed out.
“They are men.” Ro-An seemed to think this was a sufficient reason, but Epona did not. She saw it as yet another example of the asymmetric quality of nomadic life.
When Ro-An left her to go about her own duties, Epona tried to find some way to fill the day that yawned as wide and empty as the Sea of Grass. At last she saddled the brown gelding and rode out alone, aware of eyes watching her from behind tent flaps. She took Basl’s
gorytus
containing his bow and arrows and amused herself for a long time by experimenting with the weapon, shooting at clumps of grass, dismounting to reclaim her arrows and try another shot. She quickly discovered that the curved bow required a skill she did not possess.
But it was something to do. In the days to come it became almost her only occupation, for want of any other.
Ro-An brought her food and tended to her domestic needs. Kazhak came to her at night, but after lying with her he invariably left the tent and slept alone nearby, under the stars, until bad weather drove him inside his own shelter. Though she expected it every day, the shamans did not send for her. They left her alone to worry and wait.
Epona tried to establish communication with some of the other women, because she was starved for conversation. She soon realized they resented her, not because she was a foreign woman, as the men often brought back foreign women, but because she was a woman so outside their own experience. And also because she had unwittingly dispossessed Kazhak’s senior wife, Talia, a plump, graceful person who must have been beautiful in the brief youth of the steppes.
Feeling the currents that swirled around her, Epona questioned Ro-An about making friends with the other women. She longed for the friendships she had left in the Blue Mountains. But Ro-An did not seem to understand what she was talking about.
“Women cannot be friends with other women,” the Scythian said. “Each one wants to be husband’s favorite, competes with the others, plots to win favor for her sons, tries to make other women look bad. If a woman is not a senior wife, or a favorite, she is nothing. Woman cannot afford to make friends who will learn her secrets, her weaknesses, use them against her.”
So it was that Epona learned that life in the Scythian tents was a sort of warfare by itself, with intrigue and skirmishes, uncelebrated victories and unadmitted defeats. Rigantona and Sirona might have understood and even enjoyed it. Epona did not.
She tried stubbornly to befriend the other women, starting with Kazhak’s senior wife. From her own small collection of belongings she took the copper bracelet that had marked her entrance to womanhood and sent it to Talia. For several days there was no response, then one morning Ro-An came to her
carrying a fur cap with ear flaps, the gift of Talia.
She was occasionally invited to the cooking fires after that, though no one actually allowed her to prepare food, and she was aware of an unremitting reserve on the part of the women around her. However, they did talk to her, and she was able to work at enlarging her vocabulary. Talia’s grudging recognition of her did not extend so far as an invitation to join the gossiping senior wives in their beaded boots, but Epona did not mind. She suspected they had little to say that she would care to hear.
She was more interested in learning about the everyday lives of her new people, and in hearing the whispered stories about the savages who lived at the fringes of their world.
Her grasp of the language improved daily. She knew
arima
to mean one;
spou,
eye;
pata,
to kill; and so she easily understood when one of the women spoke of her forefathers having killed many men of the one-eyed race, the Arimaspi. From
oior
, meaning man, and
pata,
she recognized the Scythian name for a race of Mankillers, a race purportedly of women, incredible though that sounded, female warriors who lived somewhere at the fringes of the Sea of Grass and captured men for procreation and slavery.
Some of the Scythian wives admitted to having suspected Epona to be one of these Mankillers, at first. She laughed with delight and assured them that she was not.
The Scythian word for the shortsword was
akinakes,
spoken with affection, and the bronze battle axe, one of the earliest weapons of the horse people, was known as the
balta
. Man. Death. Weapon. These were primary words in the Scythian language.
Epona listened and learned. Much of what she encountered was difficult to understand and harder still to accept, but she tried. These were her people, now; she must find a way to fit in.
You cannot fit into a way of life you will never accept,
commented the voice within.
And there was much she could not yet accept.
The man of each family advertised his prowess in battle
by arranging his trophy heads on poles around his tent, or hanging their scalps on his horse’s bridle. Epona watched one day as a young Scythian calmly peeled the flesh from a human head he had brought into the encampment, using a rib bone as a scraper, then rubbed the scalp back and forth between his hands until it was as clean and hairless as a piece of bleached linen. When he was satisfied with its condition, he tucked the scalp into his belt for utility use, like a napkin.
Men of a neighbor tribe rode into camp sporting cloaks of similar material; many human scalps patiently stitched together. The men seemed very proud of these and stroked them as they sat on their horses, conversing.
Frequent driving rains had begun to force men to seek their tents at night, and many, Kazhak among them, invited their favorite horses into the tent with them. But their women were given no similar invitation. Once Epona saw a man lash out with his foot and kick his wife for no reason as the woman staggered past him, laboring under a massive load of felt rugs and wood strips she meant to bind together for his tent. When the woman fell, her burdens scattering widely around her, her husband turned away without offering to help. He had already lost interest in the momentary amusement.
Yet Epona saw much that she admired about the nomads. Their dedication to their livestock was unstinting and their own tenacious hold on survival demanded respect. They had developed ingenious techniques for dealing with their harsh climate: nearly impenetrable layers of clothing, woven windscreens to break the force of the gale, evolved abilities to go for long periods with little sustenance.
The women created a feast for the eyes from simple scraps of felt and threads of eastern silk, embroidering a fanciful variety of real and imaginary animals with which to color the dull monotony of their lives. The curving dynamic lines of the style appealed to the Kelt in Epona; the representations of animals, so different from the abstractions favored by her own people, touched the spirit within.
Scythian music unlike any she had heard, lanced through the body and gripped the inner being. It sang with joy and
sobbed with sorrow, and when the men danced to it, as they often did, their dance was energetic enough to race the spectators hearts.
This was a people equally capable of warmth and of cruelty and scarcely differentiating between the two. The men alternated between displays of warriorlike aggressiveness and intense brotherly affection for one another. The women appeared, superficially, to be much more placid; yet from the beginning Epona suspected this was a mold they had been forced into long ago by the circumstances of their lives—a mold that did not reflect the true shape of the spirit within.
This was a proud people, meeting the challenges of life bravely, loving beauty … and not so different from the Kelti, Epona decided, as she got to know them. Language and customs separated them, and their natures had been twisted into different shapes by the lands that bred them, but the spirits within were akin.
The last thunderstorms of the year marked the peak of autumn on the steppe with a savage attack of hail and starfire; days following days beneath rolling black clouds and wild weather. When the season passed, the air seemed unnaturally still, as if the earth mother held her breath in anticipation of something worse.
There were no
druii
on the Sea of Grass to keep count of the nights for Epona, or remind her of the dying of the year. Even if she had not seen the light change or felt the cold gathering, she would have known. Her bones, and something older than her bones, kept track of Kelti time.
The feast of Samhain was almost upon them. The Scythians were unfamiliar with the great festivals with which Epona’s people marked the change of seasons, and the nomads did not observe the onset of winter as the beginning of a new year. They also seemed unaware that on the pivotal night of Samhain eve the barriers between thisworld and the otherworlds were at their lowest. Spirits could walk freely through the
land of the living at the end of each cycle of seasons.
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.

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