Bitter Moon Saga

by Amy Lane

  “And since when,” she added in exasperation, “has Torrant ever smacked you, you little hellion, even when you’d earned it!” But Cwyn’s squeals continued until they were halfway home—when he abruptly fell asleep in his mother’s arms.

  The family wandered home in a loosely assembled group. Torrant took the rear with an exhausted and happy Starry in her baby sling next to his chest and a handful of wildflower crowns from the girls who had finally convinced him to dance. Lane trailed behind, shooing Yarri up to walk with Roes, and Torrant sensed the impending “talk” in his posture.

  “No,” he said as Lane drew near, and Lane’s smile could be seen against his silver-shot beard in the moonlight.

  “You don’t even know what I was going to ask,” Lane said mildly.

  “You were going to ask me to forget about vengeance and concentrate on growing up well,” Torrant replied, and Lane’s pained look told him he’d hit the mark precisely.

  “It’s not an unreasonable request,” Lane pointed out with a sigh. He was carrying the blankets. They had not been folded well, and armloads of heavy denim quilting kept threatening to slide from his grasp as he walked.

  “Tal and Qir fell in love last summer,” Torrant said, keeping his voice as even as possible. “They never got to handfast at Beltane.” He swallowed, hard, but kept his face stoic and manly in the razor light of the night. “Ellyot never even got to fall in love.” His brother had barely noticed either girls or boys, Torrant thought bitterly. They had both been too wrapped up in fencing and tumbling and horses and the joy of being young and strong and happy and free. Girls would have come later for Ellyot, Torrant was sure.

  “Someone owes for that,” he rasped at last, aware that a silence had fallen over his uncompleted thought.

  “ARE YOU sure the gods meant for you to collect?” Lane asked quietly, knowing Torrant’s rage was too close to his own heart for him to object passionately.

  “If they didn’t, then the Goddess most certainly did,” Torrant retorted. Almost to himself, he added, “Why the snowcat, if not to make somebody pay?”

  Lane sighed. “You promised to go to Triannon,” he said at last, unhappy about pulling that card so early in the game.

  “I know,” Torrant said, surprising him. “I’ll go after. I need to know as much as I can about the world before I take on Rath. I won’t go in unprepared.”

  It all sounded so reasonable, even to Lane, who was supposed to be too old to believe that vengeance was a reasonable response to being wronged. “Then make me one more promise, Torrant my new son.” He emphasized that for a purpose, and Torrant’s instinctive wince told him that he didn’t take his place in the Moon family lightly.

  “Right.” He patted Starry’s back lightly as they walked, as though comforting himself while soothing the baby.

  “Promise me that with all this preparing you’re going to do, that you’ll prepare to live when your vengeance is through.”

  Torrant stopped, he was so surprised. “Of course!” He looked at Lane with shocked eyes. “Yarri would never forgive me if I went and got killed before she had a chance to reject me for someone else!”

  Now it was Lane’s turn to laugh in shock. “Boyo, if you really think she’ll reject you when the time comes, you haven’t been watching the same girl grow.”

  Torrant’s response almost broke his heart, especially because he had no good reply for it. “But it would be too perfect, wouldn’t it? Yarri and me together at the end of things. I don’t think the Goddess lets anybody be that happy.”

  “Sometimes,” Lane murmured, feeling the awesome weight of fatherhood descend like the darkness had grown lead wings. Then he spied his beloved ahead, singing clearly—if a little off-key—into the night for her children. He smiled and put more heft into his comfort. “Truly, Torrant, sometimes the Goddess lets us have all we want and more.”

  …Samhain and song

  SUMMER PASSED in a flurry of working the warehouse for the men and working the garden, harvesting, and canning for the women. Twice Lane let the family ride across the channel to Otham in one of his midsized ships, to shop in small adobe rooms that smelled like spices and dine on the sides of streets cobbled in rounded yellow bricks.

  Yarri loved the shops—although she still wore pants, watching Roes preen with the new red flowers on her skirt made wrestling her into skirts and pretty things a little less of a chore. Mostly, Yarri liked buying colored wax for her pictures. Ever since the Solstice gifts, she had been drawing up a storm, filling every scrap of parchment available with pictures of her new home and the new people in her life. Her favorite color, by far, was yellow.

  There was plenty of time to play during the summer as well—there were several swimming holes in the river, and the family went nearly every evening to cool off and talk desultorily about their day. Bethen sewed costumes for the women out of dark, close-fitting linen so the family needn’t swim separately, and it was usually the best part of the evening, as was the gathering by the water’s edge after the sun set, telling jokes, and of course, more Goddess stories.

  With the exception of the breathless adventures to Otham, Yarri’s summer had been a fractious, irritated one at best. When the three of them had first arrived, she had taken to Lane immediately, recognizing a father and a protector in his warm presence, and very possibly noting the physical resemblance between her uncle and Owen Moon as well. But as time wore on, a lurking shadow cast a chill on their relationship, and although Lane and Bethen didn’t seem surprised, Torrant was often shocked at Yarri’s rudeness.

  On the evening of the summer solstice—which possessed only one real celebration, and that was the same liberties taken by young people of the town that they took at Beltane, with fewer, if possible, inhibitions about waking up naked in haylofts—the family gathered by the swimming hole and took a respite from the comparatively mild heat found by the seashore.

  “Gods”—Torrant was laughing and shaking his head—“at home we would wake up when it was still dark, run around and do our chores and walk the horses, then get back before midday, eat, and sleep until evening, just to get out of the heat.”

  Bethen shuddered. “I hate the heat,” she murmured. “And I know we’re spoiled here by the sea, but I couldn’t bear being closeted up in the valley like that. And your snows are deeper too!” Bethen was wearing her swimming costume, and Starry took that exact moment to blow a bubble on her mother’s plump shoulder, then giggle and slap the bare skin with pride. Bethen pulled her back to giggle at her and blew another bubble on the baby’s sweet soft tummy before continuing. “And holding a baby in that kind of swelter—ugh! I would have loved that man anywhere, but I’m awfully glad he came to Eiran instead of making me come to Clough.”

  Yarri, who had been a passive listener while drawing figures in the sand at the water’s edge, looked on the verge of agreement. She, of all of them in Clough, had complained the most bitterly about the heat, even from the cradle. Then she heard Lane’s name and sniffed delicately. “Well that was stupid,” she muttered, just loud enough to be heard and with a sly glance to see if Torrant and Bethen had heard. She stood when they didn’t react and stalked away toward the river. Everyone else was in the water—including Cwyn, who ventured in until it was up to his armpits, then sat and simply sang to himself, watching his toes float up to the top and touching them when he saw them. Torrant had remarked often enough that this was the only time and place the little boy was ever completely still.

  But now, at Yarri’s nasty comment about her once beloved uncle, Torrant looked pained and shot an apologetic look at Bethen.

  “I don’t understand,” he murmured, disheartened. “She seemed to adore him when we first got here.”

  Bethen smiled gently and grimaced in her niece’s direction. “She still does—don’t you see that’s the problem?”

  Torrant looked blank, and Bethen laughed a little and settled herself on a bathing mat. Torrant followed her gaze down the hill and ove
r the trees that shaded the swimming hole, to where the westering sun was presently turning the ocean into dancing bronze fire.

  “It’s one thing for you,” she said compassionately. “You… your heart has known two mothers since almost before you knew how to speak, and you never even had a memory of a father to contend with. Not that I’d wish them on anybody, Torrant, but your experiences of the world have made you….” She paused and seemed to search for the word while she put the baby down and let her sit up, the little bare back leaning against her mother’s thigh. “Grateful. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve made you grateful for the adults in your life—many of them, judging by your stories of Owen’s holding—who have loved you unconditionally. But Yarri, her only father was Owen, and—” Bethie laughed a little. “—Owen was larger than life, that he was. You might not realize it, but to this day, you still call him ‘Moon,’ as though he were the only Moon who could bear that name.”

  Torrant opened his mouth and then ducked, ashamed.

  “Don’t feel bad, darling,” Bethen continued. “It’s not your fault. I remember when I first met him, in his lovely house with all of those people who thought that he was named Moon because he shared blood with the Twins. I’d been married to his brother for over three years, and he terrified me! But then I realized what made the difference between them.”

  Torrant turned his head sideways, listening avidly, every one of Lane’s small kindnesses and quiet moments of wisdom from the past months filling his heart like marbles in a jar. “What?”

  “Belief—sheer terrifying belief.” Bethen laughed again, and this time there was some bitterness too. “Owen thought that he was invincible, that his little hold of Goddess’s brethren would sit, not twenty miles from a man who had made all forms of Goddess worship tainted, wrong, or illegal somehow, and he didn’t fear because he believed in his own rightness.” Starry made a little wobble then and fell gracelessly on her face on the bathmat, and Bethen picked her up, soothing her before the baby had time to realize she’d been wronged by the force of gravity. “Lane never had that,” she murmured to the baby. “Lane’s got this rock-steady integrity instead, that makes him admit when he’s wrong and work to be right, but he never assumes. Anyway”—her voice became brisk—“anyway, Yarri’s father was larger than life—and Lane is so very easy to love. Can you see, even with the strong resemblance between the two brothers, how Yarri might feel that loving her Uncle Lane is a betrayal to Owen’s memory?”

  Torrant laughed a little and let a handful of sand trickle between his fingers, his eyes on Yarri as she loitered at the riverbank. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail on the top of her head, and she was floundering in Roes’s swimming costume from the year before. Lane was in the water, playing with Cwyn by letting him swim to Stanny and Roes, who were close by to help him keep his head above water. Last year, Yarri had been the one paddling awkwardly in the water from brother to brother, while her mother and Kes watched modestly from the shore, and Owen called encouragement from the back of whichever horse he was working that day. Maybe it was that memory that drew her brows tight over her bright, miserable eyes and made her lip quiver as she concentrated fiercely on the pictures in the sand in front of her. Maybe it was the last violent rays of the Solstice sun.

  “Yes,” Torrant murmured. “I can see why she’d feel that way. But she’s wrong.”

  “Of course she is,” Bethen snorted. “But getting that child to admit she’s wrong is like getting the river to flow up to Hammer Pass.”

  Torrant laughed again, but his eyes remained fixed on that lonely figure at the edge of the dark ribbon of water. Far off in the distance of his heart, he heard the jangling of off-key bells.

  They told Goddess stories by a driftwood fire that night, most of them stories of how the Solstice wilding had started. More animalistic than the simple Beltane couplings, the Solstice wildings were often frightening in their intensity. Many who participated woke up the next morning naked and shaken, embarrassed by their actions of the night before, and often with a person—and sometimes a gender—they would not normally have preferred in the cold light of a normal day.

  “Ick,” Roes said succinctly, and Bethen and Lane both nodded enthusiastically enough for Torrant to wonder about their own experiences with the solstice wilding.

  “The good news,” Lane said thoughtfully while prodding the fire, “is that it teaches you the difference between love and lust. The wilding is all about what the body wants. What you feel the next day is all about what the heart wants.”

  “Which is the lesson the god Oueant learned one night long ago,” Bethen intoned, with an arch of her eyebrow, “when the Solstice sun blocked his light from the Goddess, and he and Dueant were alone in the dark, with only the sounds of the wilding beyond.”

  The family chatter died down, and everybody turned their attention toward Bethen.

  “They were not brothers, but friends, and the Goddess loved them both very much. One night she would lie with Oueant, the next with his beloved friend, and I had not heard who she was planning to go wilding with or even if she was planning to wild with the both of them, as sometimes happens, but on this night she got stuck on the far side of the sun, caring for the little stars that she had born, children of her heart and of her lovers’ hearts too, for neither Oueant nor Dueant knew who had fathered which star, and who can love one star more or less than another star, really? So on this night, the stars were fractious—perhaps they knew the wilding was coming, who knows? And the wilding happens on the summer solstice, so the sun was out longer than she thought, and the Goddess was trapped, all alone, singing her stars to sleep and wondering what her two lovers would do without her.”

  “Bethie….,” Lane protested weakly.

  “I like this story,” she said mildly, but with a wicked grin all the same. “So Oueant and Dueant were sitting, dangling their feet into the great flood of darkness that passes them by every night, and the wilding began. They could hear the drums and the laughter, and even beyond the edges of the sun, they could see lights from the bonfire, and their bodies began to move, and their bodies began to shake and to sway, and their bodies began to spin as the moons will spin, and—” She paused and looked around her. “—and, they don’t remember what happened next.”

  The children let out a collective groan, and she laughed and finished the story. “What they do remember is waking up, and Oueant, who always sparkles red, was now sparkling in blue, like Dueant; and Dueant, who always sparkles blue, was now sparkling in red, like his brother-friend, and the Goddess, who had finally, finally made it beyond the sun, was standing over them with a smirk on her face, enjoying the way they flushed so, so brightly in the morning sunshine, and especially enjoying the way they were naked from the waist down.”

  “Bethie!” Lane protested again, but he knew his wife was irrepressible, and she continued on.

  “Now, Oueant and Dueant were both mortified. They wanted to forget that the wilding had ever been the wilding and that they had ever worn each other’s coats, but the Goddess… the Goddess was intrigued. The Goddess thought that maybe it wasn’t fair that she had to sleep apart from one lover every other night, and she wanted them both in her bed, where she could hold them and make sure they didn’t wake up with nightmares or sad—the Goddess takes very good care of her lovers, she always has. And because of that wilding, the two of them agreed that some nights, nights when they were not afraid of what everyone would think of the two of them, they could all sleep together, and that is why, on the solstices, and during Beltane and Samhain, the three moons are all together, Oueant and Dueant on either side, and Triane in the middle.”

  The children all laughed delightedly, but Lane looked so pained that Torrant had to ask him, “Someone you know?”

  Lane winced. “Our three best friends growing up—they all live out in the Old Man Hills, these days—far, far away from anyone who would care.”

  “Good people?” Torrant wanted to kno
w.

  “The very best,” Lane agreed. He smiled. “They have four children, who look so much alike that they cannot even question which child was fathered by which man. It’s a good family—but not everybody’s family.”

  “No,” Torrant agreed. “Not everybody’s family.” A silence descended on his family then, as they watched the last flecks of red light fade from a sky the color of a dying spring iris. “But that’s what my story is about—it’s about a family that’s not everybody else’s family.”

  Everybody turned toward Torrant expectantly, and he smiled.

  “Sing!” urged Cwyn, but even he kept his voice low, in respect to the quiet.

  “No singing,” Torrant said. “Just a story—c’mere, Cwyn—come sit on my lap while I tell it.” He got situated with the tired little body, cool from the long time in the river, nestled into his lap in contentment.

  “Sometimes,” Torrant began, “Oueant and Dueant have the earth between them, and that’s when we see them during different parts of the day and night. In this story, Dueant was the day moon, and Oueant was the night moon, and Triane was the little girl Goddess who stayed by Oueant’s side. Triane loved her daddy-moon. She followed him when he rode the sun and sat with him in the boat as they rode the river of dark. She tagged along with him when he went to check the stars. She tumbled with the bigger stars, her brothers, in an effort to make Oueant think she was as big and strong as they were, but Oueant always knew she was his little Goddess. One night, when Triane was taking a nap, a terrible meteor knocked Oueant out of the sky, and Triane was devastated. A helpful star helped her navigate the sky, past the meteor and his terrible trail of destruction that littered their velvet night, and pulled her into the lightening twilight where Dueant lived.”