The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn)

by Llywelyn, Morgan

  A horse who fought, however, who reared and bucked and plunged, was much admired by all men, and the rider who finally won his trust and cooperation gained greatly in stature among the nomads. Aksinya once told Epona that Kazhak’s gray stallion had taken a year to break, and had fought every step of the way. For this reason his blood was especially desired on the steppe, and other herders brought their mares to him, offering Kazhak gold in exchange for his services.

  “He is the strongest horse,” Kazhak boasted. “His heart is as big and as hot as Tabiti!”

  When a young horse was used to the touch and presence of men, a saddlecloth was placed on his back for the first time and bound around the belly with a goathair girth. The tightening of the girth usually provoked another fight, and when a saddle was added renewed resistance was expected.

  It would have been possible to throw the horse to the ground, strap riding gear on him, let a man seat himself on the animal’s back, and then turn them loose to fight it out together; Kazhak told Epona this method of horsebreaking was practiced among some other tribes, but it was not the way of his people. They preferred to go slowly, taking care with each animal so the horse remained willing to learn and could be trusted later.

  The first mounting of the saddled gelding or stallion—the Scythians never rode their mares—was an event of prime importance, as it established the permanent relationship between horse and rider. If it went well, a celebration was in order, and the successful trainer of the horse was tossed in the air by his fellows amid much laughter and good-natured roughhousing. But the development of the horse did not end there; it must be continued until the animal was instantly responsive to the signals given him through reins and bridle, through shift of weight and thrust of rider’s leg. Once those obediences were acquired a horse who had shown valor in the earlier breaking process was given additional training to make him a combat animal, a full partner in the team, who would maneuver his rider into battle position and even defend a fallen man with teeth and hooves.

  The trained war-horse of the Scythians was a terrifying weapon in his own right.

  As the summer waned, the men were quick to notice that Epona’s light weight and intuitive understanding of the horses gave her an advantage they did not possess. The colts she worked with learned faster and seemed more willing. Now she was dividing her time between the flat, now-dusty plain used for training and the pen where the young horse colts were brought for gelding. During the gelding she stayed close to the animal, whispering to it, applying a paste of her own concoction to its wound to speed the healing process; but anyone looking in her eyes could see that her heart was not in the gelding pen; it was out on the plains with the herd, galloping, mane blowing in the wind.

  She had rapidly become indispensable with the horses, and Kazhak again ordered his women to take over her share of female’s work. This time Epona did not object. She gladly gave up any pretense of trying to fit into the world of the women. During the long days, under the endless sky, she often forgot that she was a woman. She was just part of the horses, and the steppe. Only in Kazhak’s arms at night was she reminded of her sex—or when she saw the eyes of Dasadas following her, following her.

  Since returning to her bed, Kazhak had become more tolerant of Dasadas. He even made occasional jokes about the man’s obsession with Epona. Out of Dasadas’ hearing, he amused Aksinya with an acidic imitation of the younger man. “Epona,” he sighed, his eyes bugging, his jaw gaping, his arms hanging loosely at his sides as if his wits had deserted him. He walked in an aimless circle, gazing worshipfully at an imaginary woman.

  “Epona,” he murmured, and Aksinya laughed.

  Epona saw the performance too, and laughed in spite of herself. Yet she knew, with a woman’s instinct, that Dasadas was biding his time, waiting for his chance at her. And sooner or later he would force the issue.

  Not only Dasadas was waiting. A giant wolf still followed the men through their dreamworlds, and as the season wore on it grew bolder, even appearing to the women in their wagons and causing the children to wake suddenly from sleep with frightened cries. “A man turned into a wolf; he growled at me!” Gala’s young son sobbed, burying his face in his mother’s lap and shivering with terror.

  “Hush, hush, is only a dream,” Gala soothed the boy. But her eyes were troubled, for she had had the same dream.

  Potor arrived, bringing a string of horses he wished to test by racing with the fastest animals in Kazhak’s collection. Though Kazhak boasted to everyone of Epona’s skills at healing, now he asked her to refrain from riding and training the young geldings during Potor’s visit.

  This provoked another argument, of course.

  “Other men will have no respect for me,” Kazhak sought to explain. “Potor will say Kazhak’s woman has turned into a man. Will laugh. Ha, ha,” he added morosely, already sorry for himself, feeling the weight of his friend’s ridicule.

  “You know I am not a man. Why should I give up something I enjoy? Just for Potor?”

  “Kazhak … asks. For Kazhak, Epona.”

  She hesitated. “Will you let me ride the gray stallion?”

  He scowled. “Kelt must always make a trade,” he complained, not for the first time.

  “You said I could never be Scythian, so of course I am Kelt,” she reminded him with malicious pleasure. “Let me ride your horse sometimes, now that breeding season is over. In trade, I will not train any horses until Potor leaves.”

  His face closed. “Kazhak will tell you what you can or cannot do. You see these trousers? Man wears trousers!”

  But in the morning she found the gray stallion hobbled close to her wagon, and she put her own saddle on him. Kazhak was already out riding with Potor, showing off a dun gelding Epona had trained herself. When the two men returned, Potor was effusive in his praise of the horse.

  “Is wonderful animal, Kazhak; is quick, obedient, very fast. Will you make trade for him, here, now?”

  Kazhak considered. “Kazhak plans to take this one with some others to horse fair at Maikop, before season of Taylga. Get good price for horses like this.”

  Potor agreed. “They are worth much gold. Potor never realized before, but you are one of the best horse trainers, Kazhak. Would you be willing to train some colts for my tribe?”

  Kazhak chewed his lip. “Is too busy,” he said at last.

  That night, as Potor and the men who had accompanied him slept, a sense of brooding malignity stole over the camp. The herd grew restless and Aksinya summoned Dasadas to stand watch over it with him, fearing the possibility of stampede. The nomads tossed and muttered in their sleep. Halfway through the night a sudden, driving rain attacked the Sea of Grass, coming so unexpectedly in the dry season that no preparations had been made for it and Epona’s little fire was drowned, hissing, in its stone circle.

  When that small fire went out an unnatural darkness settled over the wagons and the herd.

  With Potor nearby, Kazhak would not spend the night in Epona’s wagon, so the Kelt was sleeping alone when something scratched at the felt hanging over the entrance. Epona was instantly awake, staring into the darkness.

  She heard a sound like claws being raked across wood, and then a snuffling, as if an animal’s nose was seeking its way through the felt hangings. It might be one of the lean, half-wild dogs who hung around the edge of nomadic life, fighting over scraps, but … the smell entered the wagon; bitter, musky, and she knew.

  Even in the total darkness she felt his presence as tangibly as if she were looking into his face. “Kernunnos,” she said. It was not a question.

  He was standing beside her, so close she could hear his breathing: the breathing of a man, not an animal. He must be stooping slightly, for the wagon was built to Scythian proportions and would not accommodate a man of the shapechanger’s height.

  “Kernunnos,”. she said again. She wanted to hear his voice confirm what she already knew beyond doubt.

  “Yes, Epona.” It was a harsh whis
per, but it was a voice she recognized.

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You have been haunting these people through the dreamworlds, Kernunnos; people who have done you no harm. And you killed Basl. It was you who killed Basl, wasn’t it?”

  “Does it matter?” he asked again. “Those Scythians are not important to you and me, Epona. The tribe, that is important. And your talents belong to the tribe. You had no right to run away. You must go back.”

  She felt invaded; her very spirit seemed raped by his intrusion into her wagon. Summoning bravado as a defense, she asked, in an angry voice, “Can you carry me away, priest? Can you pick me up in your arms and take me back to the Blue Mountains with you?”

  He answered her with silence, and she knew then that by whatever means the shapechanger had reached her, at least he could not remove her living body from the Sea of Grass. To that degree she was safe from him.

  “I will never do what you ask,” she told him. “My life is here now, with … my husband. You have no right to claim me, for I am no longer a dependent living under my mother’s roof. I am a wife; I am free of Rigantona’s authority.”

  She heard a sound like laughter, but she could not be certain it was an audible laugh. It might only have been in her head, as Kernunnos’ voice might only have been in her head. It did not have the resonance to be expected from a real man standing beside her in the stuffy wagon. “You are not a wife,” the metallic voice, the insect’s voice, told her.

  How could he know that? She shrank back against the rugs that were her bed, striving to see him in the darkness, but she could only make out an indistinct shape, blacker than black, looming over her.

  “You are not a wife,” the shapechanger repeated. “Your place is with your tribe. Our strength is not what it was; only four druii, a weak number. You are desperately needed to help us hold the pattern.

  “Just since you left, much has changed in the village. The new ideas that rode to us with the Scythians have corrupted our young men. They talk constantly of going out of the mountains to find new land. Like you, they foolishly turn their faces away from all we have and hunger for new places and different lives. They talk of loot, of battle and glory, and the village rings with the songs of war. They have turned Goibban’s head with praise, so he labors ceaselessly at the forge creating new weapons. He thinks only of the objects he creates and does not consider their ultimate purpose.”

  She could reach out and touch him if she wanted to, she thought to herself. She could put her hand on his lean thigh and feel the flesh, know if he was real, know the true extent of his power. The power she might also learn to wield, as his apprentice in the magic house. The shapechanger at her shoulder, talking, teaching, overlaying her personality with his, making her into something she never wanted …

  She knotted her hands into fists and kept them under her blanket, making no effort to touch the priest.

  “What has any of this to do with me?” she asked.

  “You are strong in the spirit. You are young and very gifted; you could have great influence with the people. They might admire and listen to you; they do not … like … to listen to me. Under your influence they might be persuaded to give up this madness. You are young, as I said. You do not yet realize how influential you could be, but I will teach you, I will help …”

  “And Taranis?” Epona interrupted. “How has Taranis reacted to all this?”

  “He wants to make a greater name for himself than his predecessor,” Kernunnos replied. “He has begun to think he can do that by enlarging the tribal holdings of land. He is ambitious for himself and is not committed to putting the welfare of the tribe above all else. He hears the young men talking about leaving, establishing colonies in other places—by force, by killing, Epona—and he does not object. He sees them grow careless with the rituals; he knows they are no longer listening to the spirit within but thinking only of their own greed and desires, but he does not try to discourage them.”

  What was it Kazhak had said? “Man must survive. We take what we need, what else can we do?”

  “The village of the Kelti is very crowded, Kernunnos,” she said to the priest. “There is no room to build more lodges and no land for farming. If the tribe is to continue to grow and prosper, perhaps it does need to seek additional land and learn new skills. All life is change, is it not? That is the teaching of the druii themselves.”

  She felt his anger like hot sun on her face. “You are tainted by contact with these Scythians!” he accused.

  “These are not Scythian thoughts, but my own,” she told him. “How do I know it is right for the Kelti to cling to the old ways? Perhaps the time has come for us to grow as a people, to break out of the womb of the earth mother and see just how far we can reach. We need not kill to do that. There are empty lands and far horizons waiting for us. I have even dreamed …” She stopped abruptly, warned by the spirit within.

  Kernunnos was instantly leaning over her, and she could actually feel hot breath on her face. “You have dreamed what? What?”

  His force was so potent she could not resist it. “I have seen, in the dreamworlds, lands lying far to the west. To the south. Across seas.” Her voice softened and seemed to drift away from her, drifting on sea-fog and dream-memories. “Iberia,” she whispered. “Albion.” Her voice was very low, and warm, as if with love. “Ierne. The green island at the edge of the world.”

  “You see!” Kernunnos crowed with triumph. “You see what you have, what you are! You must come back to us, Epona, and let me train you to use your skills for the good of the tribe.”

  His insistence dragged her back from some far place, recalling her to the here and now, and a sense of danger. “Never!” she cried with a suddenly strong voice. “I want nothing to do with you, priest!”

  He heard the revulsion in her tone. “You hate me that much, girl?”

  She lay still, searching her memory for her earliest feelings about Kernunnos. “Yes,” she said honestly. “From the beginning, the sight of you has been like sand in my eyes. I don’t know why.”

  The priest sighed. “Other lives,” he whispered. “Other worlds. We have been enemies before, perhaps. I sense it, but I have been too busy to investigate the fabric of the past as you and I have woven it together. And now, when I need you most, you turn away from me.” His voice was fading strangely, as if he were receding farther and farther away. “Our way of life will be destroyed unless we fight for it, Epona. Our people, as we know them, will change until we do not know them at all. You must come back. You must help us …”

  “Perhaps everything should change,” she told him. “Perhaps it is time for something new to be born.” Behind her eyelids she had a quick mental image of a horse galloping free toward an unlimited horizon. Free. Unlimited.

  The priest gave a cry of despair and fell forward toward her. He was panting like a thirsty animal and his voice had grown very weak. She felt something brush across her throat, something hairy, like a man’s beard, and there was the quick, hot touch of his lips against the vein where her life pulsed.

  She struck out violently and screamed. Something staggered back, falling against stacked pots and harness, and Epona fumbled at her waist for her knife, only to remember too late that it was night, and her weapon lay with her clothing for the morning.

  Something lumbered past her and was gone, leaving her alone in the wagon with a racing heart and a dry mouth. She was wide awake. “Kernunnos?” she asked tentatively, but there was no answer.

  “Epona!” Kazhak cried, bursting in upon her. “What is? You scream.” He grabbed her in a powerful embrace, shaking her so that her heavy, unbound hair whipped around them both.

  “I’m all right except for the mauling you’re giving me,” she managed to protest. “It was …”

  “Yes?”

  “It was a dream. A bad dream.”

  He pulled back and tried to see her face in the darkness. “You dream o
f the wolf, is it so?”

  She did not answer him.

  In the morning they found one of Potor’s men lying a little distance away, crumpled as if he had been dropped there, his throat torn out and only a small pool of congealed blood remaining to show that once he had contained life.

  Chapter 28

  At last Epona could believe in her own power. Kernunnos would not have come so far, or risked so much, unless she was very valuable indeed. But even the strength of the shapechanger was limited. At such a distance from the magic house where his thislife body must lie sleeping, he could not sustain the image of himself for long without blood sacrifice, life taken to support life. And it was obviously human blood he required. As long as he tried to stay close to Epona, he would continue to exact a toll from the Scythians, taking his sacrifice from the members of her tribe.

  Not my tribe. I am of the Kelti.

  Even so, for her sake, people of the horse had been slain. The responsibility sat heavily upon her.

  Kazhak told Potor only that a large wolf had been haunting the outskirts of the herd for some time, and Potor eagerly demanded to take part in the wolf hunt. The men scoured the area but found nothing, and finally Potor had to take his dead brother home unavenged.

  But Kazhak had more to say about the wolf, in private, to Epona. “Demon wolf will kill us all, one by one. Is punishment for stealing you. What magic can you do to stop it?”

  She lowered her eyes. “None. I do not know the magic to stop it. Only the fire holds it back, but even fire can be killed.” Then she remembered. Basl had not killed the wolf, but at least he had succeeded in injuring it badly. He had cut off its ear with the iron knife acquired from the Kelti smith, after Scythian arrows had proved harmless to the creature.

  Perhaps Goibban’s iron had a strength to equal Kernunnos’ passion.