The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn)

by Llywelyn, Morgan

  Surely nextday would be better.

  Their scant meal completed, the Scythians prepared to sleep. Watching them, Epona expected they would make good use of the abundant pine needles to cushion their beds, and perhaps unpack additional blankets for warmth. In the village of the Kelti it was customary to have comfortable sleeping arrangements.

  The Scythians felt no such need. When they were ready to sleep they signaled their horses and the animals simply lay down where they stood. Each man stretched himself beside his animal, pillowed his head on its neck, and closed his eyes. With neither cushion nor extra covering the Scythians were soon snoring, except for Basl, who took the first watch.

  Epona had at least expected Kazhak would make some suggestion as to where and how she should sleep, under the circumstances, but he was the first one to put his head on his horse and the first one to snore. It had been a long day for an injured man.

  She sat alone on the bare ground and wondered what to do. Aching in every bone and muscle, at last she crawled around on hands and knees and accumulated a pile of pine needles to make a bed for herself. Burrowing into them, she pulled the bearskin cloak over her and fell into a sleep so sodden and heavy nothing could break through it.

  Before dawn she gradually became aware of voices, sounds, demands, intruding on her rest, but she pushed them away and sank back into the enveloping blackness.

  Then Kazhak was nudging her with his toe, and the sky beyond him was gray with the advance of first light. “We go,” he told her.

  The second day was a repetition of the first. If it had been hard to get on the horse the first time, it was impossible now. Epona could not bring her knees together and her pelvic bones seemed to have punched through her skin. Kazhak, already mounted, looked down at her from the gray stallion. “Jump.”

  “Yes,” she said as firmly as she could, and forced herself to her maximum effort. Kazhak caught her by the shoulder and heaved. Her body felt as if it were being wrenched apart, and her bones threatened to pull free from her flesh; then she was high enough to swing her leg over the horse. If she could swing her leg at all.

  Somehow she did it, biting her lip to keep from crying out. She would not let him see her defeated.

  The horses moved out at a smart trot.

  Now Epona was certain she would die, and prayed to whatever spirits might be listening to make it happen soon, before the stallion took another step. She was not in favor with the spirits, however. She lived, and the stallion kept on trotting.

  At first the day was warm and sunny, and if she had not been so uncomfortable she might have enjoyed watching the landscape change as they moved eastward through the mountains. The peaks had unfamiliar profiles; the vegetation took on a different aspect, with shapes and hues she had not seen before. But Epona could not look at scenery; her misery required all her attention.

  Sometime late in the morning the weather changed and gray clouds gathered, reflecting the girl’s frame of mind. Upon awakening, the Scythians had eaten a scanty meal of their tasteless meat and drunk a few sips of water before allowing Epona to do the same, and thirst had soon returned to haunt her. In addition, there was a gnawing in her stomach that might have been hunger or a revolt against the almost inedible meat with which she had broken her fast—she could not tell and did not care. She just felt awful.

  The Scythians splashed through a stream, pausing to allow the horses to drink but taking no water themselves, then cantered up a steep slope. Epona felt the gray’s haunches working beneath her like a bellows. As they topped the rise the sun broke through a bank of cloud, gilding a small stand of birch trees, and somewhere a bird sang.

  For the first time in what seemed an eternity, Epona’s attention was drawn to something beyond herself. She saw the beauty of the glade through which they rode; she let herself enjoy the sweet, tender piping of the bird. The horses slowed to a walk, and she realized with surprise that some of the soreness had worked itself out of her body. She drew a deep breath and sat up a little straighter. Her buttocks still hurt dreadfully, but the lessening of pain was a pleasure in itself.

  If it does not get worse than this, she thought, I can stand it. I will stand it. I chose to do this.

  The day passed uneventfully. The Scythians rode without rest pausing only rarely to relieve themselves, and seemed to be avoiding any inhabited areas.

  When the sun was a dull red, low in the western sky, they spotted a pair of hawks circling above them and Aksinya reached for his bow.

  “Those are hawks!” Epona protested.

  “Those are meat,” Kazhak corrected her.

  “But no one eats hawks.”

  “We do. People who will not eat this, will not eat that, those people go hungry sometime. Scyth not go hungry.”

  At least that meant they would build a fire, and she would have the familiar company of the fire spirit while they cooked the fresh meat. She began to imagine hot, tender food, though a hawk was unlikely to be tender. Aksinya brought one down with one shot and slung it from a thong tied to his saddle. Looking at the rumpled, floppy body, Epona found it hard to equate with the sharp pure lines of the hawk in flight. How empty the flesh seemed when the spirit within had fled.

  She wondered if Aksinya had made proper petition to the hawk’s spirit before shooting.

  Looking ahead to a hot meal, she rode dreamily, letting her thoughts wander. Then, quick as a flash of starfire, something cut across the vision in her mind’s eye and was gone again. It happened so fast she did not get a good look at it, but she felt uneasy. It was like an object glimpsed over one’s shoulder, or just disappearing around a corner.

  There it was again! Superimposed over the landscape around her, clear and yet enveloped in blue haze, was a face … a narrow face, with … yellow eyes …

  She jerked upright, her fingers closing convulsively on Kazhak’s belt.

  “What is?” asked the Scythian.

  “I thought … nothing. It’s nothing.”

  I was dreaming, she told herself. Because I am so tired.

  But after that she forced her eyes to stay open and looked very hard at the reassuring solidity of rocks and trees.

  When they stopped for the night it was in a forest clearing, surrounded by deciduous trees unfamiliar to Epona. Aksinya used firestones to make a fire, sloppily built from a tangle of twigs. There was no chant to invoke the spirit. Then he ran a branch through the hawk and roasted it over the fire. He only halfway plucked the bird first, and the singeing feathers smelled terrible. Epona lost what appetite she had.

  The men tore the bird in half with their hands and ate it like hungry dogs. When Kazhak had finished he passed his share of the carcass to her. It smelled rank. She turned her face away from it.

  Kazhak was insulted. “Kazhak left liver,” he pointed out. “You eat.”

  The liver was always a choice morsel; leaving it for her was a gesture of generosity she could hardly refuse. She picked the meat out of the body cavity and ate it. It was almost raw, but it tasted of blood and life, and after she swallowed it she dug some more shreds of meat from the small carcass and ate them, too.

  Kazhak grinned. “You see? Gets better, is it so?”

  That night Kazhak took the first watch. A few coals still glowed in the remains of the fire, casting a feeble light, though no one had bothered to bank the fire to provide warmth for the night. Standing beside it Kazhak stripped the clothes from his upper body and examined the binding around his ribs.

  Epona watched him through her eyelashes. When he took off his tunic his body was covered with pictures.

  She gasped aloud.

  He turned toward her. “What is?”

  She pointed at his torso. A wavy black line … a realistic snake! … curled around his shoulder and vanished into the grimy bandages on his chest. On his other arm a horned sheep pranced.

  Kazhak looked down at himself, smiling. “Is tattoo,” he explained. “Is beautiful, is it so?” He began pulling away the banda
ges, exposing a mat of curly dark hair on his chest, the nest from which the painted snake emerged.

  “How can you do that to your body? You have to live in that body!” Epona said in a shocked voice.

  “Kazhak is this body,” he answered. “Tattoo make body stronger and better.” He pulled away more wrapping, turning as he did so to give her a view of his back, where parts of horses and cats and winged creatures melted into one another as the shapechanger …

  No! She would not let herself think of the shapechanger.

  She leaned forward to get a better look at the tattoos.

  “How do they do that?” she asked, intrigued in spite of herself.

  Her interest pleased Kazhak. “Horse people have artists, make man beautiful. Prick skin, rub in soot. Is very fine art.”

  Perhaps it is, she thought, according to the Scythian concept of beauty. It was a person’s obligation to take the best possible care of the body housing the spirit, but there was probably nothing wrong with ornamenting that body, as Goibban ornamented the hilts of the weapons he made. It was not the abuse of self that eating unhealthy food was, chewing diseased meat or vegetables picked so long ago the essential spirit had departed.

  Kazhak scratched his liberated body; those strips of cloth had caused a mighty itching. He had worn them long enough, he thought. His gaze fell on Epona’s arm, similarly wrapped. “You take off too?” he inquired.

  She had almost forgotten. Was the bone healed? The gutuiters would have come to her at the right time, removed the braced rods and wrappings, offered the small sacrifice … but there were no gutuiters here.

  She slowly unwrapped the bandages herself. Kazhak came to stand beside her, peering down with interest. When the arm was free she held it up and they both looked at it. The flesh was shrunken from its long confinement, but the limb was straight.

  “Is good,” Kazhak commented.

  He threw back his head and drank the air like sweet water. “Aaahhh …” He looked at Epona again, with a new expression in his eyes. “You sleep?”

  “Yes. I’m very tired.” She began searching for dry leaves to make a bed for herself, but Kazhak’s hand closed on her wrist. “Kazhak share,” he said.

  He whistled to his horse and the obedient stallion knelt on the ground, then stretched flat on its side. Kazhak indicated the silvery neck with a sweep of his hand.

  She understood. He was offering to let her pillow her head on his horse, with him. She did not realize what an unusual offer this represented until she heard Dasadas mutter something in a clearly incredulous tone to Basl.

  Kazhak’s voice lashed out at them, and they fell silent, their backs turned toward their leader and the girl.

  Epona looked at the recumbent horse.

  She had been so reckless she had not allowed herself to think things through to their ultimate consequence. All she had thought of was escaping Kernunnos, the family that had let her down, the smith who had not wanted her enough. She saw now, with painful clarity, just what she had done.

  She had offered a trade to Kazhak and he was ready to claim his share of the exchange.

  Chapter 15

  The gray stallion lay on its side, waiting. Its long neck was stretched on the earth. She took a half step toward it and it rolled its eye at her but did not move.

  “Is good,” Kazhak prompted. “Warm to sleep.”

  Still she hesitated.

  “Kazhak come when Dasadas takes second watch,” the Scythian told her. “You sleep now, wake later.”

  She had a brief reprieve, then; the Scythian would not lie with her until Dasadas took his turn at guard duty. Gathering her cloak around her, Epona knelt down by the stallion’s head. The smell of the bear fur made the horse snort and she jumped up again, expecting the animal to scramble to its feet.

  Kazhak spoke to the horse in the Scythian language with something like love in his voice; a tenderness she had not heard before. It surprised the girl and pleased her. He must feel as she did about the animals, though he did not show it openly. They were not all as hard as they seemed, these Scythians.

  The obedient stallion lay immobile and Epona lay down beside it. She curled herself into as small a ball as her stiff, sore body would permit and rested her head on the horse’s neck.

  It was warm, silky haired, and comfortable.

  That was the last thing she knew until she felt Kazhak’s heavy body settle itself beside her. He slapped her haunch as if she were one of the horses.

  “Wake up,” he commanded. She opened her eyes, almost expecting morning, but it was not morning. It was a dark night; clouds blanketed the stars and wrapped the cold moon in gray fleece, diffusing her light.

  Kazhak’s hand moved over Epona’s body, seeking openings in her clothing.

  You are Kelti, the spirit within reminded her. You made a bargain.

  She did not move, hoping he would think she was still asleep. Then she realized that would make no difference to the Scythian. He was thinking of himself, not her. His body was ready. She could feel his erect penis digging into her thigh as his fingers worked their way to her bare flesh.

  His hands were icy cold on her naked skin, and when they touched her she jumped. Without meaning to, she slammed one elbow into his ribs, hard. The Scythian grunted in pain. He pulled away from her and sat up, hugging himself. He said nothing, however, and she curled up beneath her bearskin and wondered what he would do to her.

  When the stab of pain eased he looked down at her. All he could see of her face was a small, pale oval, lost in dark shadows. He had been thinking of her as a woman but now he was reminded that she was little more than a child, in spite of the tall stature of the Kelti. She had hurt him, but he did not think she had done it intentionally. Perhaps she was frightened. She had seemed frightened when she stopped them on the road. Women were always afraid of something. They were timid and weak, like antelope. None of them would have the effrontery to deliberately hurt a man.

  But his ribs were hurting him and it was uncomfortable to draw a deep breath. He moved around a little, testing his limits, then made a decision. The woman would wait; she would be available whenever he wanted her. She was his now and until he tired of her, so there was no hurry. Better to get some sleep and let his body finish healing, because they still had a long way to ride. A very long way.

  Saying nothing to Epona, because there was no reason to discuss any of this with her—a woman, only—he turned over and tried to find a comfortable position in which to spend what remained of the night.

  Epona lay wide-eyed on the horse’s neck and waited for the dawn. She had never felt so alone.

  Some time after Dasadas surrendered the watch to Basl, she reached out with tentative fingers and stroked the stallion’s neck, scratching that itchy place common to all horses, just behind the jaw. The stallion came instantly awake; she could feel it. But he did not move. She caressed the soft flesh between his jawbones and then smoothed her palm across his broad, flat jowl.

  The stallion sighed with pleasure.

  Epona closed her eyes and when she opened them again it was morning and the Scythians were breaking camp.

  The dawn was pink and blue and gold, the air so sharp it sliced down the throat and burned into the chest. The stillness rang in their ears like bells. The horses’ breath formed small clouds, and Epona blew her own in front of her so she could watch her essence smoking on the air, briefly tangible.

  Kazhak said nothing about the events of the night. He said nothing at all to her except, “We go.”

  Looking down as they rode, Epona noticed the color of the soil was different here, darker. The air smelled and tasted different, too, and the birdsongs she heard were not birdsongs she knew. The trees through which they rode felt as if they contained unfamiliar spirits. Not necessarily unfriendly, just … different. Days passed, and the mountains diminished.

  They moved into a range of rounded hills, leaving the thrust of the high peaks behind them. The land opened out int
o a broad valley of lush grass. On the far side of the valley was the unmistakable dark slash of a road.

  Kazhak and his men drew rein, sitting silently on their horses while they gazed up and down the road. They advanced toward it cautiously and dismounted. They squatted together to examine the wagon tracks and hoof prints on the earth.

  As they talked, Epona made out the name of one of the tribes of the people, the Boii, and saw Kazhak frown briefly. Then he grinned and mounted the stallion again.

  They followed the road for a time without seeing anyone, although twice Epona glimpsed distant spirals of smoke that must have come from lodgefires. The land beside the road settled itself into occasional hollows and low-lying areas, and a few clumps of willow were visible, their soft green darkening now as sunseason drew to a close. The breeze from the southeast carried the smell of water, and Epona and the stallion sniffed it at the same time, noses wrinkling.

  “River,” Kazhak commented.

  It was indeed a river. All her life Epona had heard of the rivers to the north of the Blue Mountains, and imagined them as larger versions of mountain streams, boisterous and tumbling, but this was a serene, winding waterway, fringed with reeds.

  “I never imagined rivers were this big,” she said aloud.

  Kazhak chuckled. “Is not big river. We follow, Kazhak show you big river, father river. Is it so?”

  Big river. If not like this, what must a big river be like? A moving lake? She wished Mahka were with her, to talk about it.

  The Scythians followed the riverbank now, preferring it to the more open and vulnerable roadway. They paused once to shoot a roebuck that bolted from the undergrowth quite near them, and Basl skillfully gutted the animal and slung it across his horse’s shoulders.

  “Better than hawk,” Kazhak promised Epona.

  The hilly pastures and rolling meadows of this new region were silty-soiled and fertile. Fields of grain under cultivation nodded their harvest-ready seedheads only a few paces beyond the riverbank. The land here had a gentler look than in the Blue Mountains; it had long been tamed to the will of man.