Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “There’s going to be no living with her until she starts riding her moon cycle,” he said glumly, and Bethen, with her husband in public and free from the smallest ones for the first time in months, wrapped her arm around her beloved’s waist and guffawed.

  “Dueant’s little toes, Lane,” she chortled, “do you think there’s going to be any living with her afterward?”

  Lane groaned, and after warning the boys to be careful with her babies—as though either of them had ever been anything else—Bethen gave Lane one of the vast trays of food she had made for the picnic. Together they moved down to the trestle tables to share their food and visit with their neighbors.

  TORRANT, YARRI, and Roes rode the circle swing until Roes groaned with dizziness, and then they walked her back up the hill to sit with Aldam and the babies. Stanny took the opportunity to go back into the crowd with his friend from town, Spence, and Torrant and Yarri left Roes with Aldam and the little ones and went to investigate the great swing. It was essentially a bench suspended by ropes between two trees on a rise, and Torrant took his turn pushing the swing backward to the top of the hill and then letting it go, listening to the shrieks of delight as the passengers felt their stomachs jump up to their throats and then down to their toes again. When his turn manning the swing was done, he and Yarri sat on it as passengers and rode until Yarri’s throat was almost raw with shrieking, and Torrant’s face hurt with laughing.

  When they spilled off the swing for the final time and reeled to the side of the hill, they sat down breathlessly and clung to each other, laughing, and that’s when they heard the sound of pipes, strings, drums, and bells skipping up the hill and tumbling around the valley. Nearly the entire town’s population was below them, dressed in their prettiest and brightest, and the excitement that thrummed up from all of those happy, dancing, chattering bodies was as palpable as the music itself.

  A silence fell between the two of them then, and they gazed thoughtfully down into the valley. Torrant’s eyes were drawn to the dancers. The couples dancing had not yet started, and the ribbon pole dancing was being saved until after supper had been served. The wild Beltane coupling—one of two nights a year when young men and women could stay up late and give in to the wilding that was young blood and youth lust without censure or judgment—would not begin until the families had gone home. Now it was the young and old, moving to rhythm with the sheer joy of being alive in the spring sunshine. To his surprise, Torrant saw the two young men he’d interrupted in the stables on Solstice morning. They hadn’t been Stanny’s particular friends, being a couple of years older, but they had stopped by the Moon house often enough and participated in the general roughhousing the boys had done outside to stay sane during the winter. Torrant had seen the taller one with the elegant sweep of dark-blond hair at the stables often after Solstice, working his own horse.

  The boy… what was his name? It rhymed with a horse’s saddle part…. Kert—that was it. Kert loved horses and had frequently gone riding on the snowless sand of the shore, and the brown-haired boy he was talking to so seriously now had been a little afraid of them. Aln, one of Jerin’s brothers, Torrant recalled now, had spent a bit of time with Yarri, warming up to the fat, harmless Kiss while the snows swirled, and the frigid surf pounded away outside the snug, public barn.

  Aln would watch his friend gallop into the snow with a look of helpless misery, the look of someone who was afraid he would always be left behind. Even from a distance, Torrant could tell he was fighting that look, fighting that hunch of his shoulders, and that Kert was doing his best to help him fight it off as well. Suddenly, in a gesture that even at a distance Torrant could interpret as “Oh fine, if that’s what you want me to do, I’ll do it!” Kert grabbed Aln’s hand and went tearing through the crowd. With the frustrated movements of a best friend or a longtime spouse, Kert hauled his friend to the circle of the ribbon pole, and once they were alone under the gaily colored ribbons he bent down from his height and kissed his friend on the lips deeply, passionately, and publicly. It was a claiming kiss, a public announcement of their relationship, and a public dare to anyone to do anything about it.

  Torrant’s heart stalled in his chest as the two lovers lost themselves in the kiss and became the focus of the crowd. In Clough, such a kiss would be the signing of a death sentence. He remembered Moon cautioning them of that often enough, cautioning Tal often enough. There was such sweetness and passion and love in that kiss that Torrant didn’t think he could stand it when the crowd turned ugly. There was no other way for the crowd to turn, was there?

  Then the kiss ended, and Kert and Aln stood, chests heaving as though they’d run a league, with sly promising smiles on their faces, as though that kiss were only the beginning.

  And the crowd applauded and cheered, and the handfastings began. For the rest of the day, until the evening dancing, couples who had decided to make a life together would go under the ribbon pole and kiss, and every kiss was greeted with cheers and best wishes and goodwill. There was more than one kiss between lovers who, in Clough, would be sentenced to death, and Torrant held his breath with each one. It was hard to forget a lifetime of being afraid.

  And at the end of the first kiss between Kert and Aln, Torrant found himself swallowing hard against tears and memories, and the tears stayed behind his eyes, but the memories couldn’t be held at bay.

  The Beltane celebrations at the Moon hold had been small, contained to the hold itself, but there had still been a ribbon pole, and there had still been dancing. The rule was that everybody danced with everybody else, because their little “township” was so small that it was unthinkable for anybody to be left out for want of partners. Tal and Qir had been excellent dancers, and had partnered everybody with glee and grace—even Ginny and Arel, who mostly had been content to dance with each other.

  But this night they had a new member of the household, the young Kith—and he had been both shy and delighted to be dancing with the two brothers. Torrant remembered a moment—he didn’t see what had preceded it—when Qir had laughed and moved out of Kith’s reach and said, “No—ask my brother. I only dance with other boys around the ribbon pole.” Kith had looked up to Tal then, and Torrant had felt the shy electric silence that had passed between the two of them and had known, somehow, that Kith’s silence and his quiet pain might very soon be eased.

  “I saw them once, kissing,” said Yarri, very much in the present, and Torrant startled and looked at her. Her shorn hair had grown back a little over the winter, and Bethen had trimmed at as only another woman could. Now it waved around her face like a spring fire in the hearth, curling up and around the crown of yellow flowers Bethie had woven through it, as though the flowers were always there and the hair and the flowers were comfortable together. With her pale, clear skin, warm brown eyes, and that wonderful hair, she looked like a vision of what every mother wanted a little girl to look like when she dreamed of a daughter. Those eyes, though—there was something overwise in Yarri’s vision, and Torrant wondered if anyone else in their world could deal with that wisdom like he could.

  “Who?” he asked, although he knew.

  “Tal and Kith—I think they might have handfasted this year if….” Torrant made a surprised sound, and she gave him one of those gamine grins that told him she had been doing something she shouldn’t have and had confessed instead of gotten caught. “Well, they were doing more than kissing,” she explained, and Torrant tried not to choke on his own tongue.

  And then, when he thought she had rendered him completely speechless, she went and really shocked him. “You don’t want to kiss any of the boys, do you?”

  “Erglplkw….” He tried again. “Yarri!”

  “Because those girls seemed to scare you.” She was looking at him anxiously, and he wasn’t sure which answer she was looking for.

  “They were predatory!” he burst out. “I would have been just fine with them if I was the snowcat!”

  Yarri’s giggle drifted d
own the hill, but Torrant was so mortified by the conversation that he didn’t notice. “So, about the boys….”

  “No,” Torrant bit out at last. “I mean no, nobody down there—boy or girl—appeals to me to kiss right now.”

  “Well, which one would you like if one did?” Yarri asked insistently, and she was being insistent for a reason that was important to her, so Torrant thought and gave her an honest answer.

  “I don’t think it would matter,” he told her at last. “It would just have to be someone I like, someone I care about. I… I know that’s not… usual,” he finished off, flushing more. “Ginny and Arel told me once that they always knew they were Goddess’s women, and Bryn said that boys made her blush from the time she was very small. But me, I think it’s the person, and not the… the gender.”

  “Wonderful,” Yarri said, and the smile on her face was blinding. Torrant had to know what was rocketing around that child’s mind of hers.

  “Why is it so important, Yar?” he asked, and unlike his own reaction to the subject, which usually included blushing and sideways glances, Yarri’s gaze was dead-on in his eyes.

  “Because Roes told me that she was going to marry Aldam, and I told her that I’m going to marry you. I needed to make sure you liked girls, because I have plans to make.”

  He should have been speechless, but he wasn’t. He’d been chewing over this dilemma since he was eight years old and had heard the far-off sound of bells. “I’ll be older than you for a long time before you’re of age, Yarri,” he said gently. “Anything can happen.”

  “Yes, it can,” she said, almost preternaturally wise. “But I don’t care who you kiss in the meantime. I don’t care who you go swimming naked with either—remember,” she added when he was going to interrupt, “I spied on Tal and Kith and Qir and Bren all last summer, and I know how things work. But when I’m of age you will marry me, Torrant Shadow, and that’s a promise.”

  She was so serious, and he had worked so hard to keep her alive, to earn a place where he could watch her grow up, that he couldn’t argue, couldn’t do anything to ruin the lovely fantasy she had wrought for her child’s heart, but he could give her an out if she chose to take it.

  “Let me know if that changes, right,” he said softly, leaning back and pulling her to lay her head on his stomach as he did so. “I’ll need to make plans too.”

  “It won’t change,” she said confidently, putting her little head on his flat stomach.

  “But if it does….”

  “I’ll tell you first.” She yawned. A short nap on the hill under the sunshine was sounding like a fine idea indeed.

  “So, Tal and Qir got naked a lot last summer?” he asked idly. Tal and Qir had probably compared notes every night, he thought affectionately. They had been that close.

  “Yeah.” Yarri yawned again, and he felt sleep weighting his eyes. “It’s funny that they never learned to look up in the trees.”

  “Yeah.” He yawned too. “I’m glad, though. Not that you looked, but that they got to fall in love.”

  “Me too,” Yarri said softly. “I’m so glad they got to fall in love.” And then the sound of the crowd faded, and they took a brief nap in the pretty, spring sun.

  When they woke up, the sun had just tipped toward westering, and it was feasting time. After that it was presentation time, when all the new couples and the new babies and the new families stood and were presented to the town. To their immense surprise, Torrant, Yarri, and Aldam found themselves presented along with little Starry, and as they stood there under the ribbon pole and Lane and Bethie stood and introduced them as foster sons and a new daughter, Torrant and Aldam met shiny eyes in the waning light and smiled slightly. The Goddess moon, which had been so close to earth the night they’d fled Clough, smiled upon them warmly, and well they knew it.

  After that was the dark dancing time, and when the manic energy of the young had finally been exhausted (somewhat) under the ribbon pole and only those participating in the wilding remained, the collective of the town families split up into smaller family groups around the great fire, and the low mumble of Goddess stories began.

  Torrant told his first Goddess story that night.

  Bethen had just finished telling one in which the two gods were obviously Roes and Stanny, her courageous and her compassionate child. She cast Cwyn as the Goddess, bouncing around the solar system off every fool thing that got in his way. The story told how he finally rolled into a giant yarn basket and covered his light part of the time, and that was why the Goddess moon waxed and waned—it all depended on the state of the yarn tangle and whether or not Cwyn could sit still long enough to let his light shine through the fouled wool.

  The family laughed long and hard at Bethen’s story, including Cwyn, who, although he didn’t understand what was wrong with bouncing off every fool thing in the solar system, did very much appreciate his mother’s tickling, which she used to punctuate the story at the end. When the laughter had died down a little, Lane asked if anybody else had a Goddess story.

  Without knowing he was going to, Torrant found himself singing.

  Ode to Tal, Qir, and Ellyot

  Mirror to mirror, brother to brother

  One courage, one compassion, and honor the other

  Four moons danced in the sky.

  Two of them danced in mysterious night

  Two of them danced in the fiery bright

  All four of them danced in the heavenly nigh

  They were joined by a Goddess, a bright bouncing moon

  Who spun with a glow of brothers’ love in her plume

  And from day moon to night moon did she dance

  Every tear did they catch, every laugh did they treasure

  Their beloved small Goddess they loved beyond measure

  And saved in their hearts every glance.

  These moons were fine men, though terribly young,

  Two were old enough barely to present their new suns

  To Father Moon who was so proud

  The family danced through their heavenly sphere

  And rejoiced with their light that each moon was as near

  As his brother, who would nurse every wound.

  From the evils beyond a meteor pitched

  And three of the moons from the heavens it ripped

  A black plague from the evil beyond

  Leaving the fourth moon, pale shadow alone

  With their bright bouncing Goddess through the heavens to roam

  So poor a beloved to shelter his Goddess from the hell of the evils beyond.

  So how do you roam without courage or honor?

  How do you live without strength or bright steel

  In a land where a blight cracks the moons?

  By his wits and his prayers one last moon did his best

  As they fled from their home without food, without rest

  And he held Goddess moon to his heart.

  He found a fine brother made of healing and love

  And with that sweet glowing moon and some help from above

  They brought Goddess moon to her harbor

  But now he stares at the sky

  And dares wonder why

  Their hearts were deprived of their brothers.

  What was this black blight

  That ripped up their fine night

  What right did it have to block sun?

  How dare this foul plague

  Descend in full rage

  And leave of the four only one.

  Little Goddess will grow

  She will thrive and she’ll know

  Her brother moons were the finest of men

  And the last moon he will hound

  That blight to the ground

  And a price will be paid for their deaths.

  Lo though it be his final debt.

  There was a thoughtful silence when Torrant’s voice died down. Every member of the Moon clan caught breath and swallowed, and Lane and Bethen exchanged one of their lo
oks that spoke volumes. Torrant figured they were probably wondering how to address this sudden pain under the glorious spring stars.

  “They wouldn’t want that,” Yarri said from his side, breaking the silence for them.

  “They’re not here to object,” Torrant murmured. His knees were still drawn to his chest. He had straightened briefly to give his whole throat to his singing, but his eyes hadn’t left the distant glow of the Beltane bonfire. The dancing at the ribbon pole had faded, and now there were bodies writhing happily together—upright for the time being, but full of sensual promise—in front of the great fire. Occasionally Torrant’s eyes would flicker as he recognized couples taking advantage of the Goddess night together who might not ever mesh flesh again.

  “I don’t want that,” Yarri said stubbornly, her chin set in the mutinous expression the entire family recognized by now. Even Cwyn’s eyes grew wide as he recognized the one will in the family that was as stubborn and as volatile as his own.

  Torrant moved slightly, turning his head to focus on her face, and his softened smile eased the set of her chin, and the whole family let out a collective breath of relief. “It won’t happen today, Yarri,” he promised before closing his eyes dreamily. “But you said it best—somebody has to be smacked.”

  Suddenly, Cwyn, who only spoke real words when he felt the world was not revolving around his three-year-old self, picked up on the one word used often enough as a threat to upset him. “No smack!” he squealed. “No smack—no smack, no Torrant smack, nooooooo smaaaaaccckkkk!”

  His outburst set the family to laughing, and the tension eased like thick water thinning from humid air. As one, everybody stood and started to gather blankets, bowls, vests, and flowered crowns to take back home as Bethen tried to assure Cwyn that no one was going to get smacked at all, not even Torrant.