by Ilka Tampke
Then I would be born.
4
Balance and Order
We eat enough, but pay fines if our belts become too large.
We couple freely, but never with force.
We observe the rise and set, the wax and wane,
the winter and summer.
What we take from the forest, we give back.
‘SALT FOR THE grain cakes. Mustard.’ Cookmother called out the list for market as she fossicked through the pots crammed on the shelves and floor. She was always promising to tidy her stores but never did, and refused to let anyone else. ‘Honey, of course. Not the watered-down sap from that cheat with four fingers. Get the elder honey from that nice Dobunnii girl with a bit of a rump.’ Cookmother grunted as she got up. ‘Don’t forget the goat, of course, and Ailia, on the way back, pick some yellow dock and meadowsweet from the marshes.’
I nodded as I sharpened my harvest knife and slipped it into my belt. Cookmother’s knees could no longer abide the steep walk, so Bebin and I went to market each moonturn, though Cookmother was always convinced we’d be fiddled.
Following the sound of market drums and bleating livestock, we made our way down to the flatlands from the southern gate. Sellers from all of Summer were gathered below, on the banks of our largest river, the Cam. We quickened our pace. The best pickings went early at market.
Neha tore ahead toward the sprawling pens of lambs and goat kids, where we found her wolfing a fresh-cut calf’s tail from our favourite seller. We haggled over the fattest of his young goats and walked on, dragging it on a rope past the ponies and hunt dogs.
Dried salmon and geese hung above tables laden with fresh carcasses. Beyond the flesh stalls were sacks brimming with salt and herbs from the trade routes, and waist-high baskets of grain and fruit. The air teemed with smells of blood, sweetcakes, dung and smoke, and the shouts of sellers calling their wares. Bebin and I wove among them, making our greetings and stopping to gossip. News of the Great Bear’s death had spread through the township, but it could not dampen the thrill of the upcoming festival and the whispers of who would be paired at the fires.
Two young men jostled to watch us pass. ‘Hold the bulls,’ one called, ‘we have found our Beltane lovers!’
‘Do you hear cocks crowing?’ Bebin asked me loudly as she pushed past them.
It was only this spring that the men of market had been noticing me. I had grown taller. Bebin came only to my shoulder, though she was as curved as a goddess, whereas I had the chest of a knave. My bloods had flowed for almost a year, but I would never be one with a wet nurse’s chest and I was glad of it. I was fair enough of face, but too strong-nosed and sharp-chinned to be called sweet, unlike Bebin, who was as succulent and wet-eyed as a baby calf. She was dark like our first people, whereas I was of middling colour, with hair the hue of beech wood and eyes as green as moss. Though I loved Bebin dearly, I would not have traded my strong shoulders for her round hips. I could not help thinking there was more use in the first.
We moved swiftly past the jewellers, toolwrights and potters to reach the sellers of cloth. As well as honey, salt and a goat, I needed to buy ribbon for my hair at Beltane. I had always worn blue. Tonight I would wear red.
As I was stuffing the loops of ribbon into my basket, I heard Bebin yelp. I looked up to see her darting around the next corner. The stubborn kid slowed me in following her, but when I had cajoled it past the medicine sellers (and paid for the pots of resin it kicked to the ground), I found her on the far side of the market, standing with Uaine, watching the young men and women practising for the games tomorrow.
I lingered, allowing them their whispers and laughter, as I watched the threshold maidens shooting archery targets. A pang of envy shot through me as a fair-haired girl raised her bow and drew back a sinewy arm. Ribbons of deerskin hung off the belt around her narrow hips. She released the arrow and hit the trunk at its centre, smiling as the crowd applauded. I marvelled at her mastery.
Fraid had come down to observe the play, for the results of this contest would help her choose which of the fresh-bled maidens would run first through the fires tonight.
Neha nosed my palm and I rubbed her cheek. If it were a contest of commanding a wayward dog I would win without rival.
‘Do you not join the games, Doorstep?’
I jumped at the voice so close to my ear. Neha growled.
In a tartan tunic pinned by a silver brooch, Ruther held himself as though the gates to the Otherworld would fly open at his command.
‘Don’t call me that. It is no kindness to be reminded so.’
‘Is it not a compliment? Are not the thresholds sacred?’
My gaze snagged on the bow of his lip, before I turned back to the games without answering.
‘Why are you not among them?’ he asked.
‘I am not permitted.’
‘Have you not bled?’ He was as forthright as a siring bull.
‘Ay, I am aged for my first Beltane, but you know as well as I that I cannot contest the Maiden’s crown.’
‘Because you are without skin?’
I frowned. ‘Yes. Because I have not been taught any of the contest skills.’
He snorted. ‘Foolish waste.’
I turned to him in surprise. ‘It is not for us to judge the laws of the tribe.’
‘Why not? Do they stand above questioning?’ He leaned closer. ‘I am recently returned from travel where I found a world greatly different from this.’ He paused, his breath warm on my ear. ‘I have seen cities where men claim their place by merit alone. Where they are no more bound by clan than the eagle by ground.’
‘If the laws are not held,’ I whispered, ‘then what protects us?’
His eyebrows shot skyward. ‘This is what I seek to learn.’
There was something that angered me in these words and in the smile that accompanied them. ‘Is it not tribal law that has placed you as nobleman?’
His smile fell away. ‘Have you not seen me fight? I will earn my position by my sword against any warrior of Albion.’
‘And a nobleman’s schooling has bought you that skill.’
He stared at me and I looked straight back. His eyes were as blue as flame. ‘So are you permitted, at least, to attend this night?’ His voice was low. ‘After all, even cows and pigs run the fires.’
I reddened. ‘Of course.’
‘And will you dance?’
‘Ay.’ No one was denied the dance.
‘And take a fire lover at your will?’
The hairs on my arm rose to stand. ‘Yes.’
‘Good then,’ he said, suddenly too jovial. ‘Perhaps I shall meet you there.’ He stepped forward, draping his arm around Uaine’s shoulder. ‘Good brother!’ he exclaimed. ‘I did not see you there, and who is this delicious sweetmeat with you?’
I stared as he laughed with Uaine, gathering the ravel of my wits. It did not take one any more learned than myself to see that he was not to be trusted.
The afternoon was busy with preparation for tomorrow’s feast.
Ianna and Cah helped Cookmother to knead the barley cakes while Bebin and I decanted the barrels of beer and lined the roasting pit with straw.
All had to be completed before our kitchen fire was doused at sunset. Our hearths burned ceaselessly throughout the year, except at Beltane, when they were extinguished, to be re-lit, reborn, by a flaming tallow stick carried back from the fires after the dance.
We were deep in work when the horn call from the shrine announced the late-day hunt.
I ran back to the kitchen and gathered the pots and vials from the medicine table. Cookmother packed her tools and we left for the shrine. She gripped my arm as we wound through the back streets. The shrine lay at the midpoint of Cad’s central roadway, but we took a less visible path so that fewer would see it was I who accompanied her. ‘My knees cannot bear the distance,’ she panted. ‘Next time you will have to go alone.’
Although I could not be taug
ht, for years, at Cookmother’s skirts I had watched and gathered, unsanctioned, the arts of healing. Because her hands had become gnarled by labour and her back twisted with age, it was I who had ground the heavy medicine stone, wrapped marsh reed tight around a cut, and pressed deep into a swollen belly to discover the lay of a babe. By the time I was nine summers old I had dressed hunt wounds open to the bone and sewn a man’s flesh with an iron needle while five men held him down.
There were physicians among the journeymen of Summer, but none as trusted as Cookmother. And none she trusted more than me to assist her, as I had until late last night, distilling the frog poisons and bud essences that would aid the hunt.
We passed the last of the roundhouses and emerged back onto the open street. Turned earth surrounded the entrance to the shrine, where calves and foals, offerings for Beltane, lay in shallow graves, their bones safeguarding the shrine.
A lone journeywoman, barely older than me, left the hall as we entered, the green robe of the novice seer billowing behind her. Cookmother stopped, offering the greeting of the salmon, and the journeywoman murmured the deer skin greeting in response.
I stood, head lowered, saying nothing, but I turned to watch as she walked away. Hers was the path of hard learning: long days in the groves, listening and questioning, twenty summers gleaning the sacred truths and rites of our country. Many sought this path, but only those who showed great fire of mind could begin it. For women of knowledge could travel far further than even their journeybrothers. The journeywomen were those who could cross—mostly by spirit but sometimes by flesh—beyond the hardworld to the spirit realm, the place of the Mothers.
‘Is she Isle-trained?’ I whispered to Cookmother.
‘I have heard she will go this summer.’
I fought a wave of envy. While the men went to the Island of Mona, the most gifted journeywomen from all of Albion trained their craft at the Glass Isle. I knew little else of it. Only that it was water-bound, protected by mists, and closer than anywhere else to the Mothers’ realm.
Within the cool darkness of the shrine, the men of the hunt were seated on rows of benches, giving thanks before the altar. Ruther was not among them and I was relieved not to be distracted as I worked the plants.
Fibor, Fraid’s brother and first of her warriors, stood waiting to dedicate the hunt, but first Cookmother had to ready their eyes and arrows with juices. She worked quickly, brushing frog poison over their upheld spear tips.
The men began the low chant to ready themselves.
Strong like a bear
Strong like a bear
I followed behind Cookmother, holding the bottles as she tipped droplets of goldenseal into their eyes to bring them clear vision.
See like a bird
See like a bird
She turned to me in annoyance. ‘Bah, Ailia, my own eyes are failing me. You finish it,’ she said, thrusting the bronze pipette into my hand.
‘Are you sure?’ I whispered. Only ever within the walls of the kitchen did she charge me with treatment.
‘Ay—begin, begin,’ she urged. ‘The mixture will not hold for long.’
I finished walking the circle of upturned faces, dripping the poison into each pair of eyes. ‘It will pass in a moment,’ I whispered to one, who winced with the sting.
Eyes streaming, the men stood, making the cries of the animal they would hunt: the short blasting snorts of the doe, the guttural grunts of the tending buck. They mimicked not in disdain but in kinship. The eating of totem meat was forbidden, except at Beltane when it was hunted, just once, and eaten to remake the bonds.
Fibor called the dedication and strode to the doorway. The men gathered their weapons and followed him out to the roadway, headed for the forest’s edge where the dimming light would embolden the deer and draw them out from the shelter of trees.
‘Return with deer or shame!’ Cookmother cried after them. She took my arm. ‘Well worked, Ailia,’ she said.
‘The knave Ruther proclaims himself loudly.’ Bebin passed a branch of fresh hawthorn to me as I stood atop an upturned woodbox. We were decorating the Great House and it was tiring work; five men on end would not reach its roof peak and five farm huts would not cover its floor.
‘Too loudly,’ I agreed, tucking the sprig of white blossoms behind a beam. Delicate petals showered on her head as I wedged it in.
‘Still,’ she said, ‘you seem to have caught his eye at market this morning.’
‘As many others catch his eye.’ I jumped off the box and dragged it under the next beam.
‘Choose carefully if he comes seeking you tonight,’ Bebin paused as she followed me, finding her words. ‘He is changed from what I remember of him.’
I straightened to face her. ‘How so?’
‘I’m not sure. There’s a newness in him. Something not of the tribes.’
‘And Uaine? Is he so changed?’
‘Perhaps,’ she answered. ‘But Ruther is somehow at its source.’
I laughed off her warning. ‘He is the son of a high warrior to the deer. He won’t come looking for a skinless girl.’ I paused. ‘No one will.’
‘Oh, Ailia.’ She took my hand. ‘It will be you who’ll do the choosing. There are knaves who’d have had you long since.’
‘None of honour.’ I picked a bud from the branches cradled in her arm. ‘And even if there were, I have no clan ties to offer in marriage.’
Bebin threw back her head and laughed in the way that saw her first coupled at every festival. ‘Beltane is no time for making marriages. It’s the night to throw rings off!’ She set down the branches on the box and turned to me. ‘This is the marriage of earth and sun! Clan ties mean little tonight.’
I nodded. ‘There’s a petal on your cheek.’
‘Sweet friend,’ Bebin said, looping her arm around my waist. ‘Do not be nervous. All will be well.’
Not until the sun nudged the western horizon did we hear the shouts and barks of the returning hunt. Bebin and I were in the courtyard, stoking the roasting pit outside the Great House. We rushed to the queen’s gate, where a crowd was gathering to meet the hunters.
Fibor came first, then the others strode through the gate, a strung milking doe swinging between them, its pelt matted with blood. The last of the hunters carried its young—a single buck, unharmed, no more than one moon old.
We followed them to the Great House, where the doe was laid on the ground at the door and received by Fraid, before the hunters swiftly gutted and lowered it, without beheading, into the pit. There were cheers and laughter from the crowd and Neha surged forward with the rest of the dogs, snarling and snapping for her share of the innards.
I stood back while the doe was covered with straw, stones and finally earth. As I turned to go back to the kitchen, I noticed the baby buck standing wide-eyed and alone beside me, paralysed by the noise and the dogs. I scooped it up, its spindly mass no heavier than a basket of bread. It struggled feebly then collapsed, trembling, into my arms.
Fraid called to the crowd. ‘Look how the sun is nearly set. Go to your homes, put out your hearths and ready yourselves for the fires!’
With shouts of excitement, the crowd dispersed and Bebin came to my side, cooing and fussing over the baby deer.
‘Ailia!’ Fraid called. ‘Go and lay out my metals. I will follow soon to dress.’
‘Can you take him back to the kitchen?’ I asked, pushing the buck into Bebin’s arms.
As I walked to the sleephouse, I saw townspeople tying rowan branches to their doorways. The boughs would protect against the dark spirits who could steal forth when the Beltane fires burned a hole to the Otherworld. The rowan was a reminder to us that when we sought light, there was an equal risk of finding darkness.
From the baskets and boxes that rimmed her walls, I pulled out all of Fraid’s metals onto a table draped with cloth, wondering what she would choose tonight. Next to the coloured armbands, anklets, neckrings and her silver festival torque was my favo
urite of her ornaments: a bronze hand mirror with the swirling face of a Mother engraved on its back. I picked up the mirror, savouring the weight and lustre of the metal and the texture of its scored pattern under my fingertips. I loved the spinning patterns that flowed from the hands of our makers. None of the Roman crafts were ever as beautiful.
On a wooden stand beside the table was the Tribequeen’s diadem, the tribe’s most sacred piece. With its hammered gold and flame-coloured stones, it seemed as if lit from within.
Glancing at the doorway, I set the mirror down. Then with both hands, I lifted the crown—heavier than I expected—and placed it on my head. When I held the mirror to my face, I gasped. Before me was a queen. A Mother.
‘Ailia?’ Fraid was at the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’
I wrenched the crown from my head and pushed it back onto its stand.
‘This headpiece marks the first consort to the deer,’ she said, striding toward me. ‘Do you seek to defile it?’
‘No!’ I assured her, furious with my stupidity. ‘I am sorry, Tribequeen. I…I was beguiled by the metal—’
She stood before me, surprise knotting her brow. ‘You might have my favour,’ she said, ‘but do not forget that I am at the very limits of my grace in keeping you here. Do not give me cause to release you. You are here by a spider’s thread.’
‘Yes,’ I whispered, bowing my head.
‘Oh, Ailia,’ she sighed as she sat on her stool. ‘This is not as I expect of you. Come.’ Her voice softened. ‘You are unsettled as we all are by the news from the east. Now, we shall forget this and you will help me dress.’
I nodded in gratitude and brought the robes from her cloak stand.
She raised her arms so I could slip the silk under-robe over her bare torso, followed by a dress of clan tartan threaded with silver. She wrapped her chain belt twice around her waist and let the heavy bronze charm rest against her belly. I helped her slide her narrow feet into leather sandals ornamented with twisting metal and coloured stones. Then she sat very still while I blackened her fine eyebrows with berry juice and rubbed roan into her cheeks.
