The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) (7 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

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The wind swirled and roared over the lake, making the last statement of snowseason, reminding puny man that the elements were not subdued, they chose to have a voice in his affairs. The men of the people, Kelti and Marcomanni together, equipped themselves with weapons and torches and prepared to search for Epona. The slopes were slippery with ice and the way was treacherous; the interior of the Salt Mountain was unknown territory to the Marcomanni, fabled but forbidding. Still, what member of the people could resist such a challenge to prove his valor?
Toutorix would lead the way. He had spent most of his life in the mines; there was not a corridor he did not know, a gallery he had not worked at one time. He almost jigged with impatience, waiting for the rest of them to get ready. It was not a job for one man alone, not in this weather.
Wrapped in furs, the three
gutuiters
accompanied the search party as far as the valley of the Kelti and waited there to care for the girl if she was brought, injured, out of the mine.
Below, in the magic house, Kernunnos once more retired to his bedshelf. His ribs stood up like lodgetimbers, pushing through his flesh, and he could see the hammering of his own heart beneath the taut skin. It would take him a long time to recover. He closed his eyes and sank wearily into the dreamworld, where nothing was demanded of him.
The Kelti led the way into the mine with their lit torches, calling out to one another at frequent intervals. The priest had not been able to identify the exact corridor where Epona lay
but had described its general size and shape, the turnings that led to it, and the approximate distance to the surface. Three or four areas might answer to those specifications, so Toutorix ordered the men to divide into groups and he took the most promising direction himself. He was not walking cautiously, as men learned to do underground, but trotting as if he ran in open air, careless of where he put his feet. “Epona!” he called again and again. “Answer me, girl. Where are you?”
His voice and the others, calling, echoed eerily through the salt caverns, distorting sound itself. Soon it was impossible to tell who was where.
Toutorix headed for the lowest level of the mine. His party could feel the oppressive weight of the mountain over them. The Marcomanni began to hang back, physically uncomfortable and emotionally uneasy. It seemed to them that they had entered a monster’s belly and the open mouth might close behind them, swallowing them up. If this was the price for working the Salt Mountain, let the Kelti pay it! Brave warriors though they were, the Marcomanni were out of their element now, and their thoughts yearned back toward light and air. The girl seemed unimportant, even if she was of the chief’s family. Proving themselves was less necessary than it had been. This was one of the otherworlds, and they liked no part of it.
“Come on, you!” Toutorix thundered at them. “Are you cowards? Hurry and we will find her soon.”
The accusation of cowardice, the epithet no man of the people would willingly suffer, forced them on, but they were muttering among themselves and making extravagant secret promises to their tribal spirits.
Suddenly Toutorix stopped, holding up his hand. “I thought I heard something.”
The men with him listened, but they heard only the blood roaring in their own ears and the faint crunching underfoot as they shifted weight on the salt.
“I hear nothing,” said Bellenos of the Marcomanni. “It may be we have come too deep and missed her; I think she is somewhere above us, if she is here at all.”
Toutorix gritted his teeth. “She is here. Follow me.” He plunged on ahead.
This time he was certain he heard a faint moan, a little animal whimper of pain in one of the dark tunnels off to the side. He had to stoop to enter, for it was lower than the central corridor, and his torch smoked against the salt. Without hesitation he made his way down the tunnel until his light revealed a salt-fall as white as a hill of snow blocking his way, crystals sparkling in the flickering light of the burning pine twig torches.
Epona had crawled out from under the mound before her strength deserted her, and now she lay on the far side, hidden from sight. But she heard his voice and managed to call his name.
Toutorix thrust his torch at the nearest man behind him and began scrambling up the salt-fall. He burrowed into it like an animal, tearing it away with his hands until a cloud of crystals filled the air. The other men fell back. They heard his voice and then hers, then his again, crowing in triumph. The experienced miners crowded forward then, each fighting to be the first to use his tools in the narrow space to free the chieftain and the girl. The light was uncertain and the confusion total, but at last Toutorix, his beard white with salt, staggered back into the main gallery, Epona cradled in his arms.
“Is she alive?” “Let me see!” “How badly is she hurt?”
Ignoring them all, he pushed past them and headed for the surface. He insisted on carrying the girl himself; he would let no one take her from his arms, even the powerful Goibban, who had been leading one of the other rescue teams. Epona’s eyes flickered open briefly and she caught a glimpse of Goibban’s concerned face in the torchlight, but before she could even smile at him she was carried past and he disappeared from her range of vision.
Toutorix plodded upward, flexing his legs deeply at the knee as he had learned to do in his boyhood, his first trip into the mines. The girl in his arms was no heavier than many a load of salt he had carried out; yet she seemed to weigh more
with every step he took. Something ached in his chest, but he ignored it.
The pain branched out into his cup-hand arm, hurting like a tooth gone bad.
The
gutuiters
met them with furs to wrap around the girl. They ran their expert fingers over her body quickly, lightly. “The bone of the arm is broken and has come through the skin,” the Daughter of the Trees said. “I will prepare healing herbs and Uiska will make the bone-paste. Get her back to the village quickly.”
Toutorix was comforted by Nematona’s words. Fortunate were the Kelti, possessed of such knowledge as the
gutuiters
had brought into thisworld, embedded in their wise, old spirits. There were few ailments for which Nematona could not make a healing medication out of plant or tree. Tea of foxglove could strengthen a faltering heart, essence of willow bark could relieve an agonizing headache. Even the deadly burning growth could be checked and shrunk away if detected in time and treated with Nematona’s brew from the sacred mistletoe. Most revered of trees was the oak, which harbored the mistletoe.
They started back for the village, Tena walking close beside the girl, chanting the song of the fire to keep her blood warm. Crowding against Toutorix’s shoulder, Bellenos of the Marcomanni looked at the face of Rigantona’s daughter and thought how fair she was. Her skin was the color of milk; her matted hair, with salt crystals caught in it like stars, resembled the gold of ripe grain. But of course she was badly damaged now; that arm looked nasty. She would not do for a wife, not this season. If she lived, she might be permanently crippled, quite unacceptable for lifemaking. When some of the men took the girl from Toutorix and carried her the rest of the way in a hammock made of blankets, Bellenos fell back and did not help them.
In the lodge of Toutorix the
gutuiters
worked over Epona. The smaller children had been sent to their bedshelves, and Rigantona and Brydda busied themselves carrying out the instructions of the
druii
women. Uiska brought a silver bowl
from her own lodge, a ewer of water with a living spirit in it, and a bag of powdered bone. Nematona prepared a compress from the herb
samolus,
plucked, as always, with the cup hand. So urges the spirit within.
Voice of the Waters made a paste of the ground bone, bone that had been burned in a magic fire to cleanse it of malign influences. As Okelos held his sister still, Uiska took hold of the broken arm and forced the bone ends back into place, shaping the thick paste around them and fitting the skin over the wound. Half-conscious though she was, Epona chewed her tongue bloody to keep from crying out and disgracing her family.
I will never do anything foolish again,
she promised herself.
Never, never … aah! It hurts!
When the arm was repaired, Nematona bound it in one of her compresses and neatly splinted the limb with two sections of polished wood from a healing-tree.
“Will the arm be crippled?” Rigantona asked then. She did not need to ask if her daughter would live; the
druii
had made no preparations for the transition of a spirit.
“She is strong,” Nematona answered. “We will wait and see. If she develops the fire that eats the flesh, send for Uiska; other than that, just keep her quiet. She has been very fortunate, if you ask my opinion.”
There was no more feasting that night. The Marcomanni slept heavily in the guest lodge, snoring from the effects of too much wine, and Toutorix lay wide-eyed on his own bedshelf, thinking of Epona and trying to ignore the pain that came and went in his chest and burned like a steady flame in his throat. He had not mentioned it to the
gutuiters
; he wanted them to concentrate their skills on Epona. He was the lord of the tribe, above pain and illness, and he did not want his people to think him otherwise.
T
he Marcomanni had gone. Shouting exultantly to one another, their young men had driven away with fine strong women of the Kelti beside them in their carts.
Sirona, who had sent Mahka’s oldest sister with them, was wearing a new necklace of amber beads as big as birds’ eggs, and Rigantona scowled every time she saw it.
Epona was thoroughly miserable, but it was not the pain of her broken arm that upset her. She had disregarded the spirit within; she had acted heedlessly, like a child, and damaged the body housing her spirit. Her mother was right to be angry with her.
At least that was what she thought sometimes. At other times she felt a rising anger against Rigantona for seeming to care more about the marriage gifts the girl could bring the family than about the girl herself. Rigantona made a great point of mentioning, at least once a day, that they would probably have to wait a whole year, a whole cycle of the seasons, before men would offer gifts to the lodge of Toutorix in return for the privilege of wooing Epona.
Rigantona’s only concern was for the things you can count and carry.
But I am a person,
Epona told herself fiercely.
I am part of the whole, more important than a mere bracelet or neckring.
“No man may want to marry you at all,” Rigantona commented when Nematona came to change the dressing on the arm and the thin, bruised flesh was briefly visible. “That arm looks to me as if it’s going to heal crooked. You will be disfigured, and then what are we to do with you? Feed you all your days?”
It was useless to point out to Rigantona that there was always enough for the tribe to eat, as long as they showed the proper reverence to the spirits.
Nursing her injury and her grievance, Epona thought of the young women who had gone off with the Marcomanni. At the next major seasonal feast of the people, in honor of the great fire of life itself, late in the sunseason, all the tribes would take part in games and celebrate marriages to ensure an outpouring of strength and fertility sufficient to carry them through the approaching winter. At that festival, in the territory of the Marcomanni, the women of the Kelti would marry their warriors in a ceremony as old as the history of the people, and the tribe’s history singer would memorize their names for future generations to know.
You could have taken part,
the spirit within reminded her.
You could have been an honored wife. Will Goibban be willing to break the pattern for you now that you are damaged? What have you done to yourself?
Every few days another band of traders arrived with wagons loaded with
amphorae
of wine and crates of fine cloth and luxury items. Soon Rigantona was flaunting—particularly in front of Sirona—a set of bracelets made of blue and green faience beads, strung with silver spacers. Cups made of glass and said to have come originally from the storied Sea People were another new acquisition, and drew many admirers. The translucent glass was frozen magic.
Toutorix and his family lounged around their firepit in the
evenings and speculated on the lives people must live in lands where such objects were commonplace.
“Illyricum fascinates me,” Rigantona said. “That trader with the bad teeth was telling me, in that outlandish accent of his, that Illyrian women are wearing gowns of a fabric from the east called silk, a wonderful cloth woven of some sort of spiders’ webs. Imagine having a chest full of such garments! He gave me some silk thread, and it is the lightest, softest material I’ve ever seen. I plan to embroider a gown with it.”
“The Illyrians say that everyone in their land wears silk,” Okelos remarked.
Toutorix cleared his throat, a sound like water pouring over gravel. “I wouldn’t run downhill to believe the word of an Illyrian if I were you,” he advised Okelos. “They are said to be of Dorian stock, and in all the years I’ve dealt with Hellenes, I’ve found the Dorians to be slowest to meet my eyes. Their honor is ice in the sun and the truth melts away from them. I doubt seriously if everyone wears silk in Illyricum.
“More than once I have had some Dorian try to tell me that many generations ago they were members of the people, our people, but I have never accepted that tale. They are not to be trusted.”
“Those who claim Dorian blood are famed warriors, and they look more like us than other southerners,” Okelos pointed out.
Toutorix replied, “That only shows they once pleased some powerful spirit and were rewarded with long bones and fair hair instead of being short and swarthy like other Hellenes. I am not persuaded they are our kin; they are outsiders and I give them no concessions. No matter what lies they tell for their own advantage, I never forget I am a Kelt of the Salt Mountain, and my spirit within can see the truth. I keep a grain of salt on my tongue to remind me not to be fooled by such as the Dorians.”
As he spoke, Toutorix absent-mindedly rubbed his chest under the armpit, on the side of the cup hand. Epona, sitting at his feet with her back propped against his knees, was aware
of the gesture and strangely troubled by it. She looked up at him and the Invincible Boar glanced down long enough to rumple her hair fondly, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
Okelos had moved the conversation farther south than Illyricum, to the cities of the Ionians: Chalkis, Eretria, Athens, where it was said every luxury and vice could be bought or sold. “How could enough people to inhabit ten villages stand to live all crowded together in one place?” he wanted to know. “It reminds me of a huge hive of bees, easily smoked and robbed of their honey. Why would people choose to live packed together like sheep unless they are weak and vulnerable? Why would a man build a house attached to his neighbor’s house unless he was afraid his own walls were not strong enough by themselves?
“When Bellenos of the Marcomanni was here, we talked, and he suggested we build two-wheeled carts, for men and weapons rather than merchandise, and follow the traders back to their cities. They claim to be so wealthy, yet they only bring a portion of their riches into the Blue Mountains. Why shouldn’t we go and get more of it?”
Rigantona was nodding agreement.
Toutorix passed his knife hand over his eyes. “We have no need for more wealth. The Salt Mountain has made us as rich as any Hellene or Etruscan, and we will be richer still if the trade in iron develops as I think it will. Why go chasing after something we do not need? Isn’t that like hunting when you need no meat, a dangerous disharmony?”
“Don’t you ever long to put on your bronze war helmet again?” Okelos asked him.
“I put on that helmet many times in my youth,” Toutorix replied, his eyes misting with memories. “Yes, it was good to carry the sword and shield into battle, but now I am surfeited with it. It is like eating too much pork. If you survive, there comes a time when you do not want any more.”
Okelos hunched forward, his elbows on his knees and his freckled face hungry. “You won all the battles, Toutorix; now no tribe of the people challenges us anymore. How can I prove myself to be a warrior with no one to fight? There are
only the games to play, and that is not the same.
“Besides, I have spent my life walled in by these mountains. I want to see what lies beyond them. I want to know the lands of long summer, where mountain shadows do not fall across my path for half of every day. I want to watch the Sea People come riding over the Tyrrhenian Sea in their painted ships, with sails like eagles’ wings.” His face glowed with more than the reflection of the firelight.
Listening to him, Epona, too, felt the first siren summons of faraway places. Painted ships, with sails like eagles’ wings.
“You have been out of the mountains,” Toutorix reminded Okelos. “You took a wagon full of gifts all the way to Mobiorix of the Vindelici when you wanted a wife.”
“That was nothing.”
“When you came back you talked about it till everyone yawned.”
Okelos shrugged. “They are just another tribe of the people. They are too much like us to be really interesting. They were generous with me because of you, you know; Mobiorix told me how he had come as a young man to try to take over the Salt Mountain and the two of you fought for seven days and feasted for seven nights.”
Toutorix hid a smile in his beard. “Almost seven days and nights,” he amended.
“It makes no difference now. But none of Mobiorix’s women would come into the Blue Mountains with me. Even when they knew I was of your lodge. I had to settle for Brydda, who was only the daughter of the chief’s sister, and I came back without even bloodying my sword. It was not much of an adventure for a hero.
“Do you not understand, Toutorix? I want to test my strength against famous warriors, as you have done. I want to win riches on my own, so my family will honor me as your family honors you.”
“If you want your family’s respect, why don’t you spend more time in the Salt Mountain?” Toutorix asked him with a trace of irritability. “I served my time in those dark tunnels. That is honorable work and good for a man; it takes a warrior
to fight the cold and the dark and his own fears, and bring out the salt. But you are too good to be a miner, is that it? Okelos of the white hands. You would rather carry a sword than a pick. All you offer your wife and child is boastful talk. You fart with your mouth.”
Leaving the sound of sarcasm hanging on the air like bitter smoke, Toutorix left the fire and stretched out on his bedshelf, his back turned toward his son.
Okelos moved over to sit closer to his wife. In a low voice, he told Brydda, “Toutorix has grown old. The elders of the council should be thinking about a new chief.”
Overhearing him, Epona asked, “Who would that be; you, Okelos? You are not to be compared to Toutorix!”
“I am his close kin, his blood,” Okelos reminded her. “The choice will be among his sons and his brothers, the noble warrior blood, so why not me?” He raised his voice to be sure Toutorix heard him, but the older man gave no sign.
Rigantona looked at her son with suddenly calculating eyes. It would be nice, now that she thought of it, to be the mother of the new lord of the tribe. Otherwise the title might well go to her husband’s brother Taranis, who had his own coterie of followers, and Rigantona would not fare so well with him. Sirona would see to that.
“This is not a matter to be decided here,” she said to Okelos. “Toutorix is still our chief. All our loyalty goes to him now, do not forget that.” In a slightly lower tone she added, placatingly, “When your day comes, my son, you will want that same loyalty.”
Okelos’ eyes were bright. “You hear?” he said to Epona. “Rigantona agrees with me; she says my day will come.”
Epona was not ready to imagine her brother as lord of the tribe; to imagine anyone other than Toutorix holding the staff of authority, protecting and guiding them all.
Rigantona was taking a second look at Okelos meanwhile; rethinking. How would the tribe fare under such a leader? She knew her son; as Epona had said, he was not to be compared with Toutorix. Still, she and her husband could anticipate many more seasons of health, could they not? There
would be no election of a chieftain soon; there was nothing to worry about.
Rigantona stood up and stretched before preparing for the bedshelf.
How nice it would be,
she thought,
if any unpleasant eventualities could be put off like debts, to be paid in the nextworld instead of this one.
In the morning Toutorix seemed as hearty and energetic as ever and Epona thought she must have been wrong to worry about him. But she could not help noticing the sidelong glances Okelos shot at the old chief, and she overheard one of the women tell Brydda that the salt miners were grumbling about some of the recent trading deals the lord of the tribe had arranged for their salt.
The men went off to the mines, the women tended the lodges and livestock, and Epona scratched at her arm and wished the healing time was over.
The alpine summer settled over the blue-green lake and the forested slopes, bringing with it a hum of bees and a fleeting lush indolence. Without the snap of ice in the air, men walked a little more slowly. Women sang more softly as they did their chores, moving languidly like plants reaching for the sun. Even the ceaseless preoccupation with woodgathering lessened.
Epona was mightily bored.
The advance of sunseason brought the summer games, replacing the winter contests that kept the hunting and fighting skills of the people at a peak during the long period of cold, when game was scarce and indoor activity occupied much of their time. In snowseason, grappling, knife throwing, and tossball were popular. In sunseason, men and boys gathered on the commonground to cast a series of graduated stone weights or to be selected for teams of
kamanaht,
the stickand-ball game using the
kaman,
or bent stick.
During the snowbound time of winter, while adult women were weaving and sewing, little girls had done their own very
important work. They braided basketfuls of patiently collected animal hair into the hard round balls that would be sent slashing across the commonground by the swiftly running competitors of sunseason.
From snowmelt until first frost the village rang in the evenings with the shouts of the players. The game began as soon as the first crew of miners returned and exchanged their heavy clothing for nothing more than battle aprons and war jewelry. It often continued until the moon was high in the sky, which made it so difficult to determine the winning side that the contest then disintegrated into a rousing kin-fight, cheered on and sometimes joined by the women.

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