The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) Page 3

  The family’s bedshelves, constructed of tamped and hardened clay, extended down both sides of the lodge, providing sleeping space for more than a dozen people. The shelves were covered with piles of furs and served as seats during the day. Beside them were wooden chests, carved and painted by the craftsmen of the tribe, designed to hold clothing and household articles. Tools, weapons, and the two-horned staff of chiefdom that Toutorix used for refereeing games took up space in the corners. As in all lodges, a firepit occupied the center of the room, with cooking utensils on its stone hearth and a bronze cauldron suspended by iron chains above it.

  In a choice location close to the fire stood Rigantona’s wooden loom, towering up into the shadows. Weights hung from each of the vertical warp threads, and the frame was painted with ocher to show the honor in which the premier activity of the household was held. Rigantona herself sat behind the loom, her strong arms moving as energetically as if she had enjoyed a night’s sleep. She did not look up as her daughter got off the bed, but she spoke to her.

  “Now that you’re a woman, Epona, you can take my turn in the bakehouse today. I want to get my weaving finished before the traders start coming; it would never do for them to see my family in the same clothes we were wearing last sunseason.”

  At the far end of the room Brydda, the young wife of Okelos, was sitting on her bedshelf, playing with her new baby by swinging a string of blue beads in the air above it and laughing when the infant gurgled and cooed. The action distracted Rigantona from her daughter. “Where did you get those beads, Brydda?” she demanded to know.

  The girl hesitated. “Okelos gave them to me.”

  Rigantona pushed herself away from the loom and stood up. “They look like mine,” she said.

  Brydda shifted on her seatbones. “Okelos gave them to me,” she repeated. “I give you my word.” She met Rigantona’s eyes with her own.

  Rigantona stopped her advance on the young woman. No one of the people would question the sworn word of another; as everyone knew, words had more magic than weapons. “Very well,” she said, with obvious disappointment. She sighed and turned back to her loom.

  During the exchange between the two women. Epona sat on her heels beside her bedshelf and opened her clothing chest. When she raised the lid she stared in astonishment. The brief, coarsely woven tunics of childhood were gone, and in their place, carefully folded, were ankle-length robes she had never seen before. Even in the shadows of the lodge they glowed with bright colors. New clothes. Women’s clothes, of dyed wool and linen instead of the plain undyed fabrics used for children. Rigantona must have put them there while her daughter was in the priest’s lodge.

  Epona lifted out a soft red gown and held it up, recalling when that lot of wool had been dyed. “I like a warmer red than this,” Rigantona had remarked, rejecting the material for her own wardrobe. Now Epona gladly slipped the gown over her head and buckled her leather girdle around her waist. Beside her bedshelf were shoes of chewed leather, shoes that remembered the shape of her feet. Shoes she had worn the day before, when she was a child. Would they still know her feet, now those toes belonged to a woman? She slipped into them and smiled to herself; they were the same friends they had always been. Good. She bound them snugly around her ankles with leather thongs so the mud left by melting snow would not suck them off.

  Epona possessed only the jewelry appropriate for children, bracelets and anklets of bronze and wood, but she found a new circlet of beautifully engraved copper waiting in the chest, beneath the colored wool. She glanced toward Rigantona, but her mother was once more preoccupied with her loom. Perhaps this ornament had been too small to go around the wrist of the chief’s wife.

  She slipped it on and started for the door.

  Brydda called, “Wouldn’t you like something to eat? The little children left broth in the pot and here is some of the cheese you like.”

  “No, your spirit is generous, but I’m not hungry yet. I just want to go outside for a little while before I go to the bakehouse.”

  Brydda nodded. Epona was an adult now. She was responsible for caring for herself and getting her own work done; the others would supervise her no longer. From now on it would be a point of honor with her to see that she completed her share of the labor.

  The outside air was so sharp it knifed into Epona’s throat and left the brittle taste of ice on her tongue. She drew breath all the way to the bottom of her lungs and held it, letting it burn, because it would feel so good when she finally exhaled.

  Aaahhh.

  After the atmosphere of the lodge, thick with the smells of people and food and sleep, a breath of the pine-scented wind was like a drink of honeyed water.

  Epona stretched, reaching her arms high and twisting with animal sensuality. The long gown she wore felt strange, bulky. It would seem odd to have her legs covered all the time by skirts.

  A pale candescence of light shouldered the mountains as the morning sun finally cleared them. Forested peaks soared skyward, beautiful and free as birdsong, patterned with constantly changing light and shadow and fragrant with conifers. The lake sparkled below, brilliant points of white light rippling on its surface as a breeze moved across it.

  I wonder if I look different? Epona asked herself again. She could have gone back to the lodge and borrowed Rigantona’s polished bronze mirror, but that might start an argument. Fortunately there was a substitute close at hand—the clear dark lake, an intense blue-green in the morning light.

  She started across the commonground, headed toward the water.

  Drifting smoke carried cooking smells from the lodges, from meat boiling in bronze cauldrons and barley simmering in water heated by stones from the firepit. Children ran through the village, yelling with the ceaseless energy that characterized all the people. Dogs barked, birds sang overhead, half-wild pigs rooted between the lodges.

  Most of the miners had already left for the Salt Mountain, dividing themselves into crews for cutting the rock salt and for felling and placing the timbers to support the galleries within the mine. Few worked in the old copper mine anymore; the salt was more profitable. The last contingent of stragglers was just setting out, the unmarried men who had no wives to urge them off their bedshelves or handclasp them at the doorway. Six or seven of them came across the commonground on a line destined to intersect with Epona’s, their casual banter changing to something else as they approached the girl.

  The men of the Kelti were much taller and more powerfully built than the Etruscan and Hellene traders who came to barter for their salt. Fair of skin, they bleached the hair on their heads with lime paste and combed it stiffly back from their foreheads. Their eyes were the color of sky and water, and each man sported a beard of yellow or reddish gold and a heavy, drooping mustache, proud symbol of virility.

  The miners were dressed in thick wool tunics, their legs wrapped in fur leggings bound by leather thongs. Mittens of leather and sheepskin caps protected them from the numbing chill within the Salt Mountain. On their backs were leather knapsacks fastened to wooden frames, containing bundles of pine twigs to be burned for illumination within the mine. The chunks of salt from the day’s labor would be carried home through the twilight in those same backpacks.

  Each man had a tally stick thrust through his belt, notched to show the number of loads of salt he had brought out of the mine during that moon period. A man of the Kelti could make up a splendid fiction about his sexual prowess—if no quick-tongued woman was nearby to contradict him—or he might invent an astonishing tale of impossible feats on the sports field. But he would not falsify the number of notches on his tally stick, for that represented his sworn word as to the exact share of the trade goods he was entitled to receive for his efforts. A man who tried to cheat the others of the tribe by claiming more than his due was sent to the spirits in the otherworlds to apologize.

  As they drew near Epona the miners’ walk became a swagger, with shoulders thrown back and strong white teeth glinting through th
eir mustaches. They strutted, they grinned, they nudged each other aside in an effort to attract the attention of the newest woman in the valley.

  For the first time in her life, Epona saw men looking at her as they did not look at children.

  “Hai, Epona!” one of them called. “Sunshine on your head!”

  “A day without shadows,” she responded, feeling a flutter of excitement at the base of her throat. At last, the real beginning of her adult life! The men fell into step beside her, crowding close, saying flattering things, patting or pinching her or touching her braided hair. “Now you are a woman, eh? And what a woman! You will steal the light from your mother.”

  “That Rigantona was magnificent in her youth,” one of the other miners remarked. “I’ve heard them tell tales of her …” He smacked his lips and his friends laughed. Epona laughed too, a little nervously but enjoying herself. Shyly at first but with growing confidence she responded to their teasing. How delightful this was! A swing entered her walk as if her slim hips had already spread for motherhood. She bounced on the balls of her feet and her laughter rippled across the commonground.

  Soon the miners reluctantly turned aside to follow the steep trail to the Salt Mountain. Epona watched them go with regret. Then a vestige of childhood broke through and she burst out in giggles.

  Grown men! Flattering me!

  There was a bit of swagger in her own walk as she proceeded down to the lake.

  To catch a glimpse of her reflection she had to wade into the icy water far enough to clear the weeds at the shore. She took off her shoes and gathered her skirts in her hands before easing into the shallows, a favorite sport of all the children in warm weather. The weather was not yet that warm, but she did not have to be brave; no one was watching. She gasped and her face twisted as the bitter cold gripped her feet and ankles.

  When the worst of it had passed, leaving her lower legs numb, she looked down into the water, waiting for the surface to calm. A blurred image of her own face looked back at her. To her disappointment, it was the same face she had always known: wideset blue eyes beneath level brows, straight nose heavily sprinkled with freckles, curving lips, and a willful little chin. Only her heavy braids looked unfamiliar.

  She stooped to peer more closely, hoping to see what the miners admired.

  “Epona! Epona, wait for me!”

  Her best friend, Mahka, came running down the slope toward her. Mahka, daughter of Sirona, who was married to the chief’s brother Taranis, was a sturdy girl, taller and heavier than Epona, but she had not yet begun the moon-bleeding and her chest was as flat as a boy’s. The time had not come for Mahka’s woman-making.

  Epona waded back to shore, feeling the wind chapping her legs. She welcomed the long skirt now. She sat down and began using it to rub her legs and feet.

  Mahka flopped down beside her on the damp mud. “I’m waiting. Are you going to tell me about it?”

  Epona bent over her reddened feet, massaging them. They felt as if they were being bitten by hundreds of ants. “Tell you about what?”

  Mahka laughed. She did not have the deep voice of Taranis, but her voice was low for a woman’s, and always sounded a little hoarse. “You know what I mean—the woman-making. We promised each other long ago that the first one to be made a woman would come back and tell the other what it was like.”

  “Oh.” Epona inspected her toes carefully before pulling on her shoes. Mahka squirmed beside her, radiating impatience.

  At last Epona said, “I would tell you if I could, but I don’t know how.” She felt deliciously superior.

  “Just start at the beginning. Or at the end; beginnings and ends are all the same, they say.”

  “I couldn’t explain it in a way you would understand. Woman-making isn’t like anything you know, Mahka. You’ll just have to wait until your own time comes.”

  Mahka doubled her fist and pummeled Epona’s shoulder, hard enough to raise a bruise. Not many of the boys were still willing to fight with Mahka these days; she liked to do damage. “You said you’d tell me. You said! Now you talk just like an adult.”

  “I am a woman.”

  “You look the same to me,” Mahka told her scornfully. “Except for those braids. They make you look like Rigantona.”

  “I will never be like Rigantona; I’m just myself,” Epona declared.

  “You’re not my Epona anymore,” Mahka said. “I know how it will be. You won’t play with me anymore, you’ll be sitting at a loom, or talking all the time about lodgefires and linen. We’ll never race again, you and I.”

  “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to,” Epona responded hotly. “I can still race you if I want; I’m a free woman of the Kelti.”

  “Then race with me now!” Mahka leaped to her feet. “We’ll get Alator and some of the others and race all the way around the village.”

  How Epona longed to do just that! To run with thudding feet and laughing lips along the narrow pathway kept smooth for the footraces of the men.

  But that would mean giving in; it would mean that Mahka had won and talked her out of her new glory.

  She passed her knife hand over her eyes. “No, I will not,” she told the other girl. “I’m going to the bakehouse.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  Epona scrambled to her feet, trying to look eager. “Yes. Just think, Mahka—I’ll get the first bite of the new bread. And maybe I’ll race with you later. If I feel like it.” She squared her shoulders and started up the slope toward the bakehouse, trying to convince herself that this was, indeed, what she wanted.

  She had not expected the transition from one life to another to be so difficult. So must the dead feel, gone to the next existence but still looking over their shoulders toward the world they had left.

  She walked with firm tread through the village, reminding herself how eagerly she had anticipated thisday. Then the glow from Goibban’s forge caught her eye and she remembered the real reason she had longed to become a woman.

  Goibban. The peerless smith of the Kelti.

  She turned away from the direction of the bakehouse.

  The smith’s forge, constructed to his own design, had a floor and workbenches of hardened clay and a timber framework to support thatched walls and roof. If a random spark ignited the thatch, it was more easily replaced than solid timbers.

  A gifted craftsman with copper and bronze, Goibban, while still a very young man, had developed a technique for working star metal. The material had once been available only in small amounts, tiny pure chunks of iron said to have come from the stars themselves. Such precious metal was used for jewelry. Then miners discovered it could be found in many of the territories of the people, in ore like copper or tin. Smiths tried without success to extract the exceptionally strong metal in sufficient quantities and with a workable spirit so it might be used for tools and weapons.

  Goibban was intrigued by the problem. The old copper smelters he knew could not attain sufficient heat to melt iron from its ore, so he devised a series of stone-lined pits in which he alternated layers of charcoal with layers of crushed ore, forcing air through the furnaces with a bellows until he had enough heat to melt the ore and squeeze out the spirit of the star metal in its truest form. The spongy mass must then be kept hot and beaten repeatedly to drive out impurities, the lesser spirits that could cause the iron to lose its courage. The end product was a bar of malleable wrought iron, ready for the anvil.

  Goibban had trained apprentices to do the actual smelting, handling the raw ore and working the goatskin bellows and blowpipe that controlled the heat of the fire. This freed Goibban to work with hammer and chisel, creating unbreakable tools and weapons to replace the old bronze ones, and inventing new uses for the iron.

  Already his fame had spread beyond the Blue Mountains.

  There was usually a cluster of admiring children gathered around the forge, crowding each other for a vantage point to watch the smith at his anvil. When the great hamme
r crashed down and the sparks flew they oohed and aahed in unison. There was no rival for the drama of watching Goibban turn a bar of iron, glowing at white heat, into an axe head or an axle. Only Kernunnos inspired greater awe. But Kernunnos was a frightening figure to children, while Goibban was patient with them, and kind, so long as they did not get in the way of his work. Goibban was immensely popular with everyone in the village—and as yet unmarried.

  There were those who whispered he had given his spirit in marriage to the spirit of the star metal and would never take a wife to be its rival. Goibban himself had said—a saying repeated now around many fires—“Gold is precious, copper is flexible. But the star metal, iron! Hot, it is as soft and graceful as a woman; cold, it becomes as hard and strong as a warrior. Nothing is more worthy of a man’s devotion than iron.”

  In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, many women attempted to compete with the iron for the smith’s attention. If a married woman showed interest in Goibban her husband usually encouraged her, for such a lifemaking could bring honor to the family and perhaps a child with the smith’s gift.

  On this bright spring morning Goibban was shaping axles for the wagons of Kwelon the oxkeeper. The work was going slowly. Sweat beaded his broad forehead and ran down his nose, dripping like a melting icicle. The new apprentice had not succeeded in clearing this batch of iron of impurities, and Goibban would have sent it back to the fire if Kwelon had not been so anxious to have the axles. Soon the passes would be cleared of snow; soon wagons must be on their way south, piled high with salt.