Skin

by Ilka Tampke

  Thoughts of Cookmother and Cad faded as I circled and sang. These journeywomen admitted me to their ritual without skin. I should have protested it, but I did not.

  Daylong we worked the fire. As evening came, I sensed the rising anticipation.

  Tara called and two women left the circle, returning with a crucible that they set upon the pulsing embers. They left again and returned with pieces of copper and tin, metals that had not been used for swords in Cad for many summers.

  The metals were given to the pot and the singing began in earnest. My voice was hoarse from chanting and my feet ached from the ceaseless walk, but now I saw that the day’s work had been only a prelude to the true song. I opened my throat and let the sound flow out of me.

  For many hours we walked, sang and waited, through the night, for the metals to shift their form. Each woman worked the bellows, swapping as they tired. I did my turn, resting my legs yet tiring my arms as Tara called us to raise the heat higher and higher.

  Finally we saw the first sign of magic: the faintest reddening at the crucible’s centre. The metals were changing. All our energies were renewed as the redness lightened to orange. Corners softened, peaks bent and spread in the base of the pot. We hastened our movement, strengthened our song.

  ‘Watch as you walk!’ called Tara. ‘The colour will tell us when it is ready to take form. It must be pale like the sun.’

  I did not know how long we continued to circle the bronze. It may have been minutes or hours. The night was lost to the ritual and I could not tear my gaze from the metal to look skyward for the moon’s hour.

  ‘Stop!’ commanded Tara. ‘Watch!’ We all stared as a single bubble slowly birthed itself in the orange liquid, its languid beauty so miraculous that I began to weep as others were weeping. The sun’s blood was in our pot.

  ‘Now,’ shouted Tara. ‘Step back!’

  Two women stood in wait with wooden paddles. They wore pads of sheepskin over their arms and chests. For the first time I noticed the earthen mould propped with sticks in a pit beside them. The two women stepped forward and lifted the crucible. A branch near the fire ignited.

  ‘Quickly!’ Tara called.

  The bowl was brought to the mould. I feared it would spill. I had heard stories of smiths burned to death in this rite before.

  The women positioned the crucible above the mould’s small entrance. Others prepared smaller paddles to dam the charcoal that had flown into the bowl.

  All of us were chanting loudly.

  ‘Pour!’ screamed Tara and the bowl was tipped. Molten metal ran from the crucible deep into the mould. The women howled in pain but they held firm to the paddles. The mould filled and the surface sank as the fluid settled into its shape.

  ‘Again!’ screamed Tara and the women prepared for a second pour. They had seconds before the bronze was too hard—already it moved more slowly.

  ‘To the water!’ cried Tara once the mould was filled. The women rushed it to a trough where the water boiled as the mould was plunged into it.

  We were drenched in steam. The mould hissed and spat until the water worked its power and the sword was silent. The women whispered incantations to bless the bronze and hold the sun spirits within its form.

  The first streaks of the new day coloured the sky as we gathered around the mould, which had been placed on the ground. With a small axe, Tara carefully broke it open and inside, too hot to touch, was a perfectly formed grey-yellow sword.

  ‘We are blessed,’ said Tara.

  The sword was laid in a grove of oaks to rest and we went to the huts to sleep. For all the next day I lay between black lambskins in a dreamless oblivion that rested my aching body more deeply than it had been rested for weeks.

  At evening time, we gathered around the embers, sipping sheep’s milk and honey. I listened as the women chattered, their cheeks rosy and chafed from yesterday’s fire. Of the twelve houses in the hutgroup, three were used for sleeping. The others, I was told, were forge-houses, store-houses and places for the design and blessing of weapons. They were simple huts, built in an old style of river stone and daub. There were still some of this type in the oldest streets of Cad.

  Tara was not among us. They explained that she sat alone in communion with the sword and would return by tomorrow. One of the women replenished our horns with milk.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said as she poured mine. ‘I will need the strength to face what awaits me at home.’

  ‘Home?’ said the woman who sat beside me, the same woman who had attended my arrival. Her name was Meb. ‘Why do you speak now of home?’

  ‘Why should I not speak of it?’

  The others stopped talking and turned toward me.

  ‘Do you know nothing of why you have come here?’ continued Meb.

  ‘No,’ I whispered, my fingers tightening around my cup.

  ‘You are here to learn. Only when you have learned will you be free to go home.’

  My pulse quickened. ‘And if I leave now?’

  ‘You may try,’ said Meb. ‘But you will not be able to.’

  I looked around at their strong and beautiful faces. I knew Cookmother and Bebin would be frantic by now, and that Fraid would never forgive such an absence, but it was as if I had drunk of the henbane, lulled by an assurance that all would be well. ‘What, then, am I to learn?’

  The next morning I awoke to see Tara beside my bed with the fresh-cast sword in her hand. ‘Come,’ she whispered.

  I dressed and followed her to the forge-hut.

  She placed the sword on a bench and began to work the blade with a piece of leather that had been coarsened with resin and river sand. It was a small sword, like the ancient weapons, barely two handspans long. A sword for use, not Ceremony.

  She handed me a second piece of leather and showed me how to buff the bronze. The fine frill of metal around the blade edge, where the bronze had seeped into the tiny cracks at the mould-joins, had been chiselled off, along with the pouring cup at the sword’s tip. ‘Firm strokes, do you see? It will take a day to work it to a half-sheen, then we will form the cutting edge. Two more days buffing after that.’

  ‘And then?’ I asked.

  ‘Then you will learn how to use it.’

  I looked up, speechless. In Cad swords are made only for Elders and tribekings and only once in their lifetime. Even lesser warriors had to go to battle with arrows, knives and spears, so powerful were the swords. ‘Is it to be mine?’ I asked, unbelieving.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said.

  I rubbed the bronze in silence, lost in the fathoming of these events. It had been two nights since I met with Taliesin in the forest, or was it three? My sense of time was drifting.

  ‘So let us begin,’ said Tara, continuing to polish. ‘What did you learn from the pouring of the sword?’

  I opened my mouth then closed it, mute. It was wondrous and I was changed by it but I could not say what I had learned.

  ‘Then answer me this,’ she said. ‘The tin that was dug from the ground and put over the fire. Does it now exist?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘No, it does not
.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’ Her black eyes burned. ‘It was changed by heat: deeply, irrevocably altered. But it still exists.’

  I nodded, wanting more.

  ‘This is the lesson of the fire. Form can be changed. Shape can be shifted. But nothing is lost.’ She stroked the sword steadily. ‘So it is with the human soul. It will pass through many births, many bodies, but the soul, like the cosmos, is indestructible. This is what feeds our courage. This is what is true.’

  I set down my leather cloth and stared out the open doorway. The day would be cloudy. Tara’s words led my thoughts to Taliesin, and I wondered if he had learned the lesson of fire. If he was nourished by this truth, as I was.

  ‘Why do you cease?’ asked Tara. ‘Are you troubled?’

  ‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘I am thinking of a knave I have met near here.’

  ‘A knave?’ She sounded surprised.

  ‘Yes—of some height with dark hair.’ I looked at her. ‘Have you seen him? Do you know of whom I speak?’

  Her strong brow furrowed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He has not come here. And it would not be well for him if he did. This is a women’s place. Men are not permitted here. Men will not survive here.’

  I was trained by Tara herself. We ate more flesh than I had ever eaten, we worked our bodies for all the hours of the sun. At night I slept, exhausted, by her side, more soundly than I had ever slept.

  The sword that I had watched being created was made complete with a bone handle carved with secret messages. Every morning I trained in its use. Less the use of the weapon to render a kill (although this, of course, we learned), than the opening of my spirit to that of the sword, the summoning of the forces that had formed this weapon.

  At highsun we ate, then I spent afternoons learning the art of the fight. I was taught to stand firm and draw spirit through my bare feet into my task. I learned how the fury that possessed me when I came upon the slaughtered fawn could be harnessed to my will.

  My skills blossomed. I parried with many tribeswomen, each bringing a different pattern to the battle’s dance, and I learned to match and better them all. Three full moons passed in this learning. My mind became sharp and precise like the blade I swung, more alive than it had ever been. And Taliesin’s presence was bright, as though my learning brought him close.

  Yet when I thought of anything beyond him, beyond this gathering of women, my thoughts became veiled, as though I was recalling a dream. I asked the women many times, as we sat by the fire at day’s end, where I was and why I had come, but they only chuckled at my confusion and wondered that I had not been better prepared.

  What I dared not ask them of was skin. Like outcasts, they did not greet with it, they did not speak of it. I could only imagine that they assumed I was skinned, and I said nothing to correct them. For the first time—by some twist of grace—I was learning, and I would not endanger it for anything.

  Eventually I asked nothing at all, because deep in my bones I knew where I was and why I had come. As my learning grew, I let myself think what I had not dared think, and hope what I have never dared hope: that these were neither outcasts, nor even journeywomen. These were the Mothers and I was walking among them. Not fleetingly, not by spirit, but by flesh. I was in the Mothers’ realm. I had journeyed without skin.

  I should have been frightened. But I was not.

  The boundaries between realms are potent, bound by many taboos.

  Realms must align for souls to pass.

  SUMMER WANED, REPLACED by a crisp autumn.

  I sat polishing the sword beneath flame-leafed trees at the edge of the hutgroup, waiting to begin the morning’s training.

  Meb approached and I rose to meet her. ‘There will be no training today,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  She paused. ‘Today you will fight.’

  I nodded and collected my polishing leathers. I had been told this would come. I knew I was to be matched with one of similar strength, perhaps a little stronger, as it should be a good fight, one to test my knowledge of swordcraft, my communion with the metal and, of course, my courage.

  Meb was quiet as she prepared me in the sleep hut.

  As she readied my washwater, she yielded no word of my foe. Surely they would not have me fight Mandua, who was like a she-wolf in battle, or Sirit, who could summon glamour almost as powerfully as Tara.

  Meb bathed me and painted my skin with ground red stone. She was coiling the last of my braids when the horn call sounded.

  Outside, the women had formed a circle. They parted so that I could enter, and waiting within—naked, with owl feathers in her hair and swirling patterns on her chest and face—was Tara herself.

  I looked back at Meb, who nodded with encouragement.

  They were testing me well in this match. So greatly did I honour Tara that I was already weakened. But I had been taught to fight, so I would fight.

  I walked in, unsheathing my sword. Already the bone handle I had so lovingly polished felt like part of my body as I grasped it. We stood before each other, swords raised, as the women chanted the invocation to fight.

  Mandua sounded a shrieking cry and the spark of combat ignited.

  I took an instant to form strategy and Tara exploited it, her weapon whistling as it tore through the air. I lurched back, lifting my sword in a powerful block. The tone had been set: she would not win unchallenged.

  She drove me back with three lateral swipes.

  I struggled to parry them, sensing their position by the movement of wind as they descended. Then, in the split second she took to shape her next stroke, I lodged an attack: two sharp lunges that forced her retreat. Our audience took breath.

  ‘Ha! The learner is bold,’ she hissed.

  I knew that at any moment she could enchant me and my terror would be too great. So I whipped the sword furiously before me, the clang of metal ringing in the air.

  We locked eyes and I saw hers darken. I swiped into the space between us. In the next instant she loomed, her skin alight, so dazzling that I could not see her edge. Her strikes came one each side in a steady rhythm.

  Blinded, I swung my sword wildly back and forth to protect myself, but I was beginning to stumble. ‘Mothers, help me,’ I called from my heart. The weapon grew warm in my hands. Time slowed. I paused, at great risk, to draw spirit through my feet. First of the earth, then yet deeper, fire.

  Tara was upon me. I felt her sword’s breath before its cut, painless at first, a clean slice, then a fierce sting as blood pulsed from the wound. It was long and bone-deep in my swordless arm. But I had drawn. Spirit was within me.

  When Tara halted at the sight of my blood, I attacked with four driving swipes. She staggered back. All around us, the women shrieked, inciting us to fight without mercy. Tara’s face was a grimace of rage as she swore and spat at my strikes.

  But I was not angry. I was at peace.

  My handle grew slippery with blood, but I drove forward with unwavering force until, with my fiercest blow, Tara lost her footing and was down on the ground. I straddled her with my sword at her chest. Though she was trapped beneath me, I feared her still.
‘What am I to do?’ I whispered. In training, fights finished with laughter and a shared piece of sheep cheese.

  ‘Kill me,’ she whispered. ‘That is your task.’

  I looked frantically to Meb, then to the women around me but no one disputed her command.

  I turned back to Tara’s fine face, her chest pounding under the point of my blade. Then I stepped away, casting my sword to the ground. ‘If that is my task, then I have failed it. I will not kill without purpose.’

  Tara rolled over then jumped to her feet with throaty laughter. ‘Oh, you are good! We’ve not seen one such as you for some time.’ She picked up the sword and handed it to me. ‘This is yours. You have earned it. Now go to the healing tent and tend your wound. Then we will eat and drink for the last time. Tonight you leave us.’

  Evening drew and the women led me to the mouth of the forest track that would carry me away from this place. Excitement danced in my belly as I glanced at the rising moon, as full and golden as the one that had carried me here.

  I wore a woollen shawl and leather cloak over my own summer dress. Though my wound ached beneath its flax dressing, my muscles were hard from training and from the animal flesh I had eaten in such abundance. I was ready to face whatever my return to Cad would bring.

  I embraced Meb and the other women in turn, until I came to Tara.

  She kissed my cheeks, then held my sword out before her on flattened palms. ‘This sword is our body. It is your body reborn. Carry with it the knowledge of fire.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, as I grasped it. It was weighty and warm like a living creature.

  Tara met my eye. ‘The sword will bend the world to your will, Ailia. But once it takes life, it will have no greater power than that. Do you understand?’