The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) (11 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

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Rigantona was striding toward him, hot on her daughter’s heels. Seeing her, Toutorix set his face in the stern, implacable
mask of his warrior days. He called her name in an angry voice. Rigantona hesitated.
Watching the two of them, Epona clenched her fists by her sides and hated her feeling of helplessness.
I have a right to shape my own life
, she thought, not for the first time.
Toutorix faltered. Six paces away from him, Rigantona saw his face take on a strange bluish color and his eyes widen. He opened his mouth as if to say something but no word came out, only a croak like that of a trampled frog. His cup arm clamped convulsively against his side and his knife arm made a wild circle in the air, then canted forward with the rest of his body, falling like a toppled tree, out of the world of now.
E
pona was the first to reach him. As soon as he stumbled she darted forward, and by the time he hit the ground she was already calling for help. She threw herself to her knees beside the fallen chieftain and cradled his head in her arms, willing him to open his eyes and look at her. But the eyes remained closed, buried in deep purple shadows. The face of Toutorix looked like a skull, the skin as pallid and lifeless as beeswax.
Rigantona bent over them. “What happened? Is he all right? Get up, Toutorix; don’t lie there on the ground making a fool of me.”
Epona tried to shut out her mother’s words. She needed to concentrate on Toutorix in this very special moment, for she needed no
gutuiter
to tell her his spirit was leaving his body. She looked up at her mother imploringly and pursed her lips to ask for silence.
Rigantona understood at last. She knelt on his other side, her face almost as pale as his. Both women heard the death rattle in his throat as his spirit forced its way upward, and
watched in silence as his lips gaped open to release it.
People were forming a circle around them now, jostling and asking questions, but their voices died away as soon as they realized what was happening. One must be silent during the passing of a spirit. They had been silent after Brydda’s last wild shriek.
Poel pushed his way through the crowd and knelt next to Epona. She glanced up quickly, grateful for the swift arrival of a
drui
at the moment of transition. Poel laid his fingers against the side of Toutorix’s neck, feeling for the throb of lifeblood, but there was no response. He waited long enough to be certain, then passed his hand over his eyes, signaling Rigantona that her husband’s life was over.
Still they waited. Life, and the end of life, has its own rhythm.
In the silence they heard the faintest sigh. It might have been wind in the pine trees but it was not. The crowd fell back so as not to impede the passing of the spirit. Epona felt the weight in her arms grow heavier.
“Gone,” she said softly. Her eyes and her throat were burning.
All lesser matters must be set aside now. The lord of the tribe was dead, and no other business could be conducted until the ceremonies of his transition were completed. Vallanos and some of the nobles went to the passes to intercept approaching traders and demand they make camp until Toutorix rested with the ancestors.
Toutorix had had the bad timing to die before a new chieftain could be chosen to whom he would hand his staff; therefore, it became the property of his widow until the council elected his successor. But such an election could not be held until the funeral rites were completed, and until that time, Rigantona held the staff of the chieftain and none could dispute her authority.
With considerable satisfaction, she propped the staff against her loom where all who came into the lodge could see it. She then sent her children from the lodge and summoned the elders of the tribe, as well as the five
druii.
She made a big show of offering her guests red wine and honeycakes, but they all knew they had been invited for a serious purpose. Rigantona began explaining almost at once.
“Toutorix was an exceptional chieftain,” she reminded them, as if there was any chance his prestige might already be tarnishing while his body was still cooling in the house of the dead. “Perhaps the greatest leader in the history of our people. Under his guidance, the Kelti developed a trade network that crosses the earth like rivers and streams. Because of his reputation, Kelti daughters have married into every important tribe of the people; our blood is everywhere. We have more friends than enemies. Who else can make such a claim?”
The elders nodded their heads. Rigantona had begun the meeting as the late Toutorix had always opened negotiations with traders, by talking on subjects where there was agreement and getting them accustomed to assent before the hard bargaining began.
“I have stood at my husband’s back,” she went on, “and listened to the strangers who come here from other lands. I have heard how the dead are honored elsewhere, among the Makedonians and the fierce warriors of Sparta, among the Lydians and Phrygians and the Etruscans of Etruria. Especially among the Etruscans. The funerals they give their dead princes would do honor to the dying sun itself. Our paltry rituals are insulting by comparison, and the spirits we send into the otherworld must be embarrassed when they meet the spirits of the Etruscans.
“Need I remind you, no member of the Kelti likes to be embarrassed? And Toutorix least of all?”
She addressed Nematona directly. “You are senior
gutuiter
; you preside over birth into thisworld as the priests preside over birth into the next. We honor your wisdom. Tell me, Daughter of the Trees, is it not true that the
druii
adapt each funeral ritual, its songs, its sacrifices, to the person in transition? Must not one’s way of death fit, even as clothes fit the body?”
“You speak truly,” Nematona agreed.
“Then should not a very special celebration be prepared for my very special husband, one that would cause his name to be remembered for all the generations to come?”
Nematona paused before answering, trying to feel the thoughts of the other
druii
, but the lodge was filled with so many tensions she could not separate them from the general atmosphere.
“What you say has merit,” Nematona replied at last, cautiously. Better not make a commitment until she could see where all this was leading and confer with her colleagues.
Rigantona, however, smiled with satisfaction. It was enough agreement to begin the serious bartering; she had learned much, standing at her husband’s back. “Hai. Then I would like to have Toutorix buried unburned, as the princes of Etruria are buried, with enough symbols of wealth and prestige beside him to impress anyone he may meet in the otherworlds. And when I make my own transition, I want my body put with his, to share in all he has as I have done in thisworld.”
There was a frozen hush in the lodge. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath, its omnipresent cheerful crackling muted to a hiss.
The
druii
and elders looked at Rigantona incredulously; they were shocked by her suggestion. She gazed back at them with all the authority she could summon, determined not to be intimidated by the protests sure to come.
Rigantona had been badly frightened recently. Although she had seen sacrifices before, Brydda’s death haunted her, filling her thoughts with fire and screaming, making her suddenly nervous of consigning her own body to the flames. Formerly she had given little thought to transition; the high, sweet air of the Blue Mountains did not foster the diseases that ravaged the riverlands from time to time, and death seemed far away, something that happened only to the old. Rigantona had never thought of herself as old. She felt the same inside as she always had. When she looked in her polished bronze mirror, she thought she saw the face she had seen when she and Toutorix were first married.
She would grow old sometime, of course, but not yet. She would leave her flesh and her jewelry, her clothes and scented oils, sometime. When she and Toutorix were feeble and tired of their bodies. Many seasons from now.
Then all at once Toutorix was gone, and when Rigantona looked in her mirror she saw a face she hardly recognized, an aging face with the sap dried out of it. She had nothing left but her wealth …
She must hurry to make provisions to take it, all of it, with her, to enjoy in the otherworlds. And there was a way it could be done. Other peoples knew of it, practiced it, believed in it. She would, too.
Old Dunatis cleared his throat and stood up. Everyone turned respectfully to watch him. Many seasons ago, when Dunatis was still a young miner without even a shortsword and throwing spear, his wife had borne two children by the old history singer of the tribe, Maponos. Both of those offspring had subsequently proved to be
druii
; the first was Poel, and later, Tena. Now Dunatis was revered by the Kelti, enriched by gifts given to him in honor of his offspring. He had built himself a lodge high on a steep slope where none but the eagle could approach him, and it was said the spirit of the mountain herself guarded him because he had been so favored.
“We have burned the bodies for many generations, and we have prospered for many generations,” old Dunatis said in his phlegmy voice, fixing Rigantona with the stern eye of tradition.
She replied, “Toutorix and I sometimes discussed this, as a man and woman discuss things on their bedshelf.”
Or we might have,
she thought to herself,
if he had ever had time or inclination
. “Does not the history singer tell us that in the morning of our race we lived far to the east on a great plain, and buried our dead unburned, in barrows in the earth?”
The
druii
and the elders rolled their eyes toward Poel and the bard nodded assent.
There was precedent, then.
Rigantona’s eyes sparkled, as she sensed triumph. “I only
ask that we consider a return to this good way of sending our dead to their nextlives. It is not appropriate for a lord of the tribe Kelti to have his discarded flesh burned and the ashes poured into a miserable urn better designed for storing melted fat, a few trinkets dropped in beside him like child’s toys. No! We can carry our debts over and pay them in the nextworld, so why not carry our wealth with us as well? As others do? Are we not at least as wise as the Etruscans?
“Are we not wise enough to consider a ritual the chief himself desired?” She flung that last statement at them like a lump of gold thrown into the trade, knowing no one could contradict it. Who could guess what the lord of the tribe had said to his wife on their bedshelf?
It was a shrewd ploy. The councilors were reminded of the chief who might be watching them at this very moment from the otherworlds, assessing their reactions. It would be a foolhardy thing to anger the spirit of a man like Toutorix. In his youth, he had been the strongest warrior of the people, and once freed from his worn-out body he might be that strong again. It was well known that he never forgot an insult or set aside a grudge. If this new ritual was truly what he wanted …
Dunatis stroked his scanty white beard. “There may be something to consider here,” he told Rigantona, watching as she closed her fingers around her husband’s staff and ran her hand up and down it, slowly, drawing all eyes, bringing the power of Toutorix to life once more in the lodge. The staff of ultimate authority.
“The council cannot take responsibility for making such a decision,” Dunatis told her. “We can only advise. It is druii business, this making or changing of ritual.”
“But you would not oppose it?”
Dunatis looked around the room at the other elders, carrying on a quick consultation with his eyes. “No,” he said, turning back to Rigantona, “we would not oppose it if the
druii
say it can be allowed.”
Rigantona turned to the five
druii
, sitting shoulder to shoulder. “How say the members of the priesthood?”
Uiska murmured in her soft voice but no words could be
understood. Her restless hands moved in her lap, her fingers rippling like water. Tena sat with the firelight burning in her red hair and said nothing. Nematona stared into some leafy distance no one else could see. Poel covered his face with his hands, lost in contemplation.
Kernunnos stood, facing the wife of the dead chief. “You propose a very serious undertaking, Rigantona,” he told her sternly. “This would be a major change in the pattern and I am not certain it would be of benefit to the tribe.
“Spirits enter thisworld naked and appropriate bodies to inhabit while they are here—human, animal, plant—we do not know the reason why a spark from the great fire of life chooses one body over another. Some return to take human form again and again; others do not. But when it has exhausted the possibilities of a body the spirit moves on, because life is always on the move, seeking.
“Would a spirit, therefore, have any real need to carry a great weight of possessions from thisworld to the next? Why should it be so burdened when it did not come here that way? Is it not better to set the spirit free on wings of flame, to go forward with its existence unimpeded?”
Tena threw back her head and looked up at Kernunnos with a bright hot smile.
Rigantona set her jaw. This would be a fight and she had no intention of losing.
“I only want to do what is best for my husband and the tribe,” she said. “As I have the consent of the council, I think we can allow them to return to their lodges and I will discuss this matter privately with the
druii.
”
If a struggle for power beyond death was to take place between the chief’s wife and the priesthood, the elders unanimously preferred to stay clear of it. Without hesitation they handclasped Rigantona, one by one in the order of their rank, and filed out of the lodge.
When she was alone with the five
druii,
Rigantona put her ultimate weight on the scales of trade.
“I realize that I am asking you to make a great effort and take certain risks,” she said, “and I understand that a comparable
sacrifice is demanded. I am prepared to offer one. Nothing can be asked without a gift being given, and there is such a gift for you: my daughter Epona.”

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