by Ilka Tampke
Had it held? I worried as I scrabbled to standing. Or had the skin of our tribelands been torn?
Cookmother said nothing when I returned to the kitchen, though the clatter of pots spoke loudly enough. She served stew and oat bread to each of the girls, but it seemed I was to fetch my own. At the sleeping hour, she told me I could not lie in her bed. This she had never done.
My heart thudded with outrage as I lay next to Bebin.
‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered, ‘she will soften by the morning.’
‘Be silent,’ hissed Cookmother.
The kitchen slept but I could not settle. Outside the insects droned. The night yawned on, noisy with snores and tossing bodies. I got up. My foot caught on a basket as I passed, spilling barley kernels across the floor, but I could not stop to tidy them now.
Outside the air was warm, the moon still dazzling. Dogs howled through the township and I muzzled Neha with my palm. My senses were wakeful, my mind too alert. I would never sleep this night. I clicked Neha to my side and began to walk.
The rush of the Cam was louder by night, frogs beating at its banks. The moon lit my path. I quickened my pace. I was headed for the forest and I did not question it. Looming like a beast in the darkness, its breath drew me in. But even stronger than this, I knew Taliesin was close. He was what pulled me.
If Cookmother would not recognise me, then I was not bound by her command. If skin would not claim me, then I was outside the laws of skin. I realised now that there was freedom in being cast out: that I was beholden to nothing but my own will, my own desire.
I shivered in readiness for Taliesin’s touch. This was the night that earth and sun would join in us. I could not give him my song. But he would have everything else. I crouched down to kiss Neha—who still would not follow—and went in.
The canopy stole much of the moonlight. I stole forward by my ears and fingertips. The forest pulsed with danger but I was not scared.
Soon the trees thinned and there was enough light to see the sparkle of the river and the trunks that lined the path. There was no hutgroup, no fire, no women.
I came to the place where the hazel boughs reached over the pool, the blush of their berries still red, even in moonlight.
He came from the mist.
I greeted him but he did not return it, his bare shoulders rigid under my embrace. He was still angry, I thought as I released him. And yet he had come. Or was he here only to cut himself free of me?
He walked to the edge of the pool and stared into the water. ‘Shall we swim, Ailia? I know you have grown fond of it.’
‘No,’ I said, relieved, at least, to hear him speak. ‘Not at night.’
‘I have always loved to swim in the dark.’ His voice was distant. ‘My mother used to call me her night salmon.’
I walked to him. Perhaps, if I was gentle, I could lure him back. ‘Tell me something of her,’ I ventured. ‘Your mother.’
‘Short of temper. She had little patience for motherhood.’
‘But she must have loved you,’ I said.
‘Not enough to return for me.’ He looked straight ahead.
‘Taliesin—’ I touched his back, ‘—I can be no comfort to you unless you speak to me. I don’t understand—’
‘No.’ He turned to me, his expression bitter. ‘You do not understand. You will never be a comfort to me. You see only the light.’
‘It is not so,’ I said, recoiling. ‘I have known darkness, but I do not let it rob me of hope.’
‘Then you are a fool awaiting the next blow to your back.’
I stared at him. ‘Do you know so little of joy?’
‘I know pleasures,’ he spat. ‘A strong ale, a woman’s thighs.’
I winced. ‘There is more than that.’
‘The blind may believe it,’ he said. ‘I know of the world’s truth.’
‘But there is truth in the light! Your own riddle said it so—’
He snorted with disdain. ‘A riddle to comfort the stupid.’ His eyes glittered in the darkness. He was made ugly by this cruelty. I had never thought him so.
‘A life in darkness is no life at all,’ I said. ‘You might as well bid goodbye to this world and go searching in the next.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Useful advice.’
‘No!’ I cried, gripping his arm. ‘Don’t speak it—’ My chest ached with the sting of this soured meeting, the fear of his threat. ‘Why do you seek to wound me so?’
‘Why did you not return my song?’
I stood poised at the edge of a cliff. I took a breath. ‘Because I have no song to return,’ I said softly. ‘I am a foundling. Half-born. Unskinned. There. Now you have the truth of it.’
There was a pause. ‘But you are skin to the deer—’
‘No,’ I said, faint with shame. ‘It was a lie.’
‘A lie,’ he whispered. ‘Why?’
‘Because I did not want you to know the truth of me.’
‘Unskinned?’ He stared at me with an expression I could not fathom. ‘You will never journey—’
‘Of course not.’ I felt my heart beginning to harden like his. ‘I am no journeywoman. I am nothing, as you yourself have said so plainly.’
We sat in silence, the truth like a wound between us.
I awaited his goodbye. I prepared mine. But there was something more to be told. ‘I have confessed myself to you,’ I said. ‘Will you now tell me who you are?’
He stared out into the night, his face unmoving. Eventually he spoke. ‘I am not of the tribes.’ He paused. ‘I come from a different place.’
‘What place?’ I asked.
He turned to me. In the dim light his eyes were shadows. ‘It does not matter what place. Without skin, you will never reach it.’
‘Are you one of the outcasts I have seen in the forest?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I am sorry I cannot bring you more truth.’
I laughed in my sadness. ‘You are the only thing that is true to me.’
Beneath our feet was a soft, damp blanket of leaves. He sat, pulling me down beside him. ‘How are you permitted to be here so late?’ he asked.
‘I follow my own command now in these matters.’
He laughed heartily until I also was chuckling at my own boldness. The grey light smoothed his skin to a velvet softness. He was the dissolving of me. We both looked to the water as another red nut fell.
‘I am so sorry,’ I whispered.
He turned to me. ‘I love you no less unskinned, Ailia.’
My breath stopped. ‘How is it so?’
‘How could I not? I love what sits here before me. You are free and alive and brave beyond words. But without skin you will never come to my place and I cannot stay in yours. We can meet only like this, fleetingly and bound to this place. It is no offering for one as beautiful as you—’
‘I will have you however I can,’ I said.
He leaned forward and kissed my mouth. Never had I known such tenderness.
My senses were needle-sharp. All else beyond him paled. But beyond this moment, there was no ground between us, nothing to stand on. He was the cliff, the danger. I jumped.
We fell back, legs tangling. This time it was he who was hungry, tearing open my dress to savour the rise and taste of my breasts.
I drank the briny scent of his shoulders and neck: sharp and sweet as bitten apple. This was not the frantic clutching I had known with Ruther. This was the earth’s renewal brought to flesh.
In seconds we were ready, aching to join, but when I reached down to lift my skirts, he pulled away as if the wanting was too strong.
‘Why do you stop?’ I leaned up to kiss him, to bring him back, but he pushed me away.
‘I cannot—’ His face filled with anguish.
I could barely speak for my confusion.
He sat with his back to me, his breath heavy.
Throbbing, swollen with need, I hardly dared ask the question that came to my lips. I did not want to open the chasm between us. But I had to know. ‘You asked if I could journey. Is that what would bring me to your place?’
A ragged cloud darkened the moon.
‘Yes,’ he said.
My blood quickened. ‘But that means…you are of the Mothers’ world.’
Silence.
‘Are you of the Mothers, Taliesin? Are you of their place?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered, and then he was gone.
I did not look up. To watch him go now would have broken me apart. My skin burned. I had to cool myself or I would crack.
I loosened my dress and under-robe, letting them slide to the ground as I stood. Naked, I stepped into the pool. The water was cool silk against my skin. I shut my eyes and sank to my neck.
But my eyes sprang open. I was not the only life in this pool. Something quickened at my shoulder and I knew it was there: my fish. This time I knew it was male. Only a male creature could bear the fierce heat of me now.
Through the black water I could not see it, but I felt its sinewy current as it circled me in tightening rings until its rough scales grazed my chest. It turned, darting and nibbling at the points of my breasts, bringing a pleasure so exquisite I cried out aloud.
For a moment it was gone, and then was there again, brushing my thighs as it swam past my legs, then between them. It was such sweet relief to be finally touched, that I could not help but make space for it, as it nosed at the creases and folds of me.
And when it burrowed, snaking into my body’s darkness, the force of my yearning for Taliesin broke open and I was lost in a shudder of pleasure so great that my legs buckled and I dropped fully beneath the water, where the fish kept on with his ways until I was thrown into such jolts of release that I felt I would never need air again.
I turned and tumbled. My legs reached for the river floor but could not find it. Still the fish was around me, within me. Which way was above and which was beneath? Pressure mounted in my chest as I grew desperate for air. Then even the fractured moonlight ebbed away and I was surrounded only by blackness and water. I was weakening. I sensed the fish was still near but I could not feel him now, nor anything else. The darkness closed in and I started to sink.
In Ceremony, we are fully in accord with the Mothers.
In Ceremony, we are kin to the world.
WHEN I OPENED my eyes I was on the riverbank. My body was bruised and strewn with tendrils of reed. A violent cough brought silt water erupting from my stomach. Exhausted, I rolled onto my back and looked up at the sky, pale and pink, through the canopy of trees. The day was young.
I sat up. I had washed up on the opposite bank from where I had entered the river, yet my robes were beside me. How had this come to be? Had I lost my memory? It had to be so, although Taliesin and the fish hung strikingly clear in my mind. I dressed quickly and walked downstream, looking for a place to cross back. Cookmother would have woken and I shuddered at the reprimand that awaited.
The sun broke into the forest, setting every wet leaf ablaze. Although I was only across-river from a familiar path, there was a strange otherness in the scene around me. All was as it should have been: wind on my skin, lark-song in my ear and grass at my thighs when I squatted to piss. But the colours were more vivid, the shapes more distinct, as though every tree, blossom and stone were proclaiming itself. I quickened my pace, keen to be free of the forest’s magic.
Soon I had walked long enough that I should have been at the forest’s edge, but I was still deep amid trunks. The shadows were shortening. Cookmother would be sending Bebin out to search.
At the next step I stopped. Once again, I smelled fire and heard faint voices drifting on the smoke. Was it the women? The outcasts? Perhaps they could guide me. Perhaps they would have some knowledge of Taliesin. I left the path and walked toward the voices. This time there was no river between us, no veil of smoke. This time I was on their ground. Cookmother had said they were women of violence. I had to go carefully.
I stopped just short of their clearing and watched from behind a wide beech trunk. Their fire was yet mightier than when I saw it first. The women walked a circle around its edge. Over the roar of the flames I heard their chant, rising in pitch as they completed three rotations and began in the opposite direction. Others worked bellows at the base of the fire, shouting to align their blows. Their arms were muscled and patterned with ash. They did not look like outcasts. They were as gracious as any women I had seen.
As the sun lifted over the trees their chant became louder. The fire surged and its radiant heat warmed my face as I peered from behind the trunk.
One woman stood on a raised platform, calling the chant. She must have been a journeywoman or some weaver of magic, for although her fleshform was only of moderate height she carried a glamour so tall I had to tilt my head to see her face.
Abruptly her magic receded and I saw her in her earthly scale. Her short hair was dark and woolly, her eyes like blades as they searched the forest. She lifted her hand to silence the women. ‘Where are you?’ she called into the open space.
My heart thumped as I drew behind the trunk.
‘Show yourself.’
She was speaking to me. I stood frozen. I had no choice but to go forward. I emerged from the trees and walked into the clearing, bowing my head.
‘Name yourself,’ the woman called.
‘Ailia,’ I said to the ground.
‘Address me by name.’
I looked up. Her eyes were upon me. ‘Forgive me. I do not know your name.’
‘Address me by name!’
I was faint with the fireheat and the fear I would condemn myself by this ignorance. I closed my eyes and drew deep breath. Without warning, there was a name at my lips that had formed itself outside my knowledge. ‘Tara,’ I murmured. Then louder so she could hear: ‘Your name is Tara.’
She laughed a warm, throaty laugh and called me forward.
I approached warily, Cookmother’s warning ringing in my ears, but when she thrust out her hand to be kissed, I was soothed by the touch of her. ‘It is good to have a visitor,’ she said. ‘We were not expecting it. Take some milk, then join the wor
k.’
‘What work is being done?’ I asked.
‘We are strengthening the fire,’ said Tara. ‘Tonight, if the metals are willing, we pour a sword.’
Smithing was men’s work in the town, sacred work, and I had heard only snippets of it from the crafthuts. How the favoured days for sword-pouring were few and how on such days the fire must burn long to trap the daylight, so the power of the sun itself would be captured in the sword. It was not craft for the unschooled and I told Tara I had no learning in it.
‘Baah.’ She waved me off. ‘You have come. You will learn.’
One of the women took me to a hut, where she gave me a heavy leather tunic and a long horn of sheep’s milk. ‘How did you come?’ she asked.
I thought of the fish and my thoughts clouded. ‘I am not sure.’
Worry passed briefly over her face. ‘Come. There will be time after the rite for the figuring of you.’ She walked to the door.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Tell me who you are.’
The woman turned, frowning. ‘Are you so unprepared? We are the makers of weapons.’
‘Are you…outcasts?’
‘No,’ she said, bewildered. ‘We keep the wisdom of fire.’
They were some class of journeywomen. But of which township? And why had Cookmother told me they were outcasts?
Outside the women had resumed their chant. I stepped into the circle, into the space they made for me. The chant was long and intricate and at first I could not voice even a word of it, but after some hours and many cycles it came as effortlessly as breath.
