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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

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Epona nodded.
That
was what had happened, then; in the moment when the shapechanger appeared to be a wolf and
she snarled back at him, the spirit within had spoken to her, telling her to show defiance.
“But how does my spirit know these things?” she asked Nematona, who was standing to one side, watching her with a grave smile. “Where does its knowledge come from?”
“From the source of all wisdom,” the senior
gutuiter
replied. “From the great fire of life that is shared by every living thing, in thisworld and in the otherworlds. The spirit within you is just one spark from that fire, but through it you are given access to the accumulated knowledge of the whole, if you will only learn to listen.”
Epona frowned, trying to stretch her thoughts wide enough to embrace understanding. “Are you saying the spirit in me is kin to the spirits in the animals and plants? How can that be?”
Tena spoke up, taking her turn in the instruction. “
All
life is part of one life,” she said, “and that one is sacred to all. We worship it in each of its many forms. It animates us and we share in its immortality. The spirit known in thislife as Epona will die and be reborn, slip in and out of the flesh, move from world to world, as we all shall, but it will continue to partake of life because we are all parts of the whole.
“The great spirit of life has many faces. In summer we worship it in the form of the goddess, for spring and summer are the seasons of the female, the time of birth and harvest, the celebration of warmth and light and fertility, life renewing itself.
“Snowseason is the season of the male, the hunter of the autumn and the craftsman of the winter, the provider who shelters and protects. It is the time for testing, for strength and endurance, and for the death that precedes birth.
“Death is nothing to fear, for life comes after. Spring follows winter. Morning follows the night. Be joyous and unafraid, Epona, for you are part of immortal life itself, and the great fire burns in you.”
Tena stretched out her hand and laid it palm down on Epona’s forehead. Without conscious volition, Epona closed her eyes and crossed her hands over her heart in response. A
radiance filled her; a commitment to her place in the endless cycle; a pleasure in being part of the whole.
The
gutuiters
walked back to the chief’s lodge with her, not surrounding her as guards, but following one pace behind as an escort of honor. As she walked, Epona felt little twinges of pain and something warm trickled down her legs. By the time she reached her family’s lodge her thighs were sticky and she could smell blood.
At the door of the house the
gutuiters
saluted her and turned away. Over her shoulder, Tena said, “Take care not to dream of a man nextnight,” and the other two laughed. Nematona laughed like the rustling of leaves; Uiska’s chuckle echoed the bubbling of brook water.
In accordance with the ancient custom, the older members of Epona’s family had kept watch for her through the night. Toutorix had honored her by dressing for her arrival in a fresh linen tunic and new woolen cloak, Rigantona’s finest weaving, in the red and green plaid of his family. Around his neck he wore the heavy gold neckring of a proven warrior chief, and massive bronze bracelets reinforced the strength of his wrists. The hair on his head had been newly bleached with lime paste, disguising the fact that it was no longer ruddy gold but streaked with silver, thick with the frost that obliges a man to measure his age in winters rather than summers. His cheeks were clean shaven, as was customary for a man of noble rank, but beneath them his mustache and beard were as luxuriant as ever. Toutorix wore an air of aggressive masculinity as easily as he wore his tartan cloak, though his broad shoulders were beginning to stoop and the muscles in his legs had grown stringy.
Married women still made approaches to him and many children in the Blue Mountains bore the stamp of the lord of the tribe on their faces: the passionate proud features and sky-colored eyes.
Over his tunic Toutorix sported a broad leather belt ornamented with bronze plates and squeezing him a bit more tightly than it had in his youth. But he was not fat; no man of the people would willingly allow himself to grow fat, to
suffer the ridicule and punishment meted out to one who lost his shape and could not fasten his belt. Seen casually, he was the same powerful patriarch his family had always known, and Epona was warmed by the sight of him.
Arrayed in her best linen gown, Rigantona stood beside her husband. She was seasons younger than the chieftain, but as women did not bleach their hair it was possible to see that frost was making inroads in her yellow braids. Yet her shoulders were broad and proudly carried, and the breasts that had suckled many children were still relatively firm. When she raised her arms the muscles rippled in them as they had done when she was a girl, so skilled in the use of sword and spear that no boy her age could stand against her. No longer did she train, stripped, to fight beside her husband if needed, however; by now she was content to enjoy a degree of leisure and wear all the jewelry she possessed wrapped around her neck and stacked on her arms and fingers. The autumn of her life was a pleasant season for Rigantona.
Epona saluted the chief, then went directly to her mother to show she had returned the brooch. Rigantona examined it thoroughly before looking at her daughter’s face at all.
“I am told I did well,” Epona remarked, knowing better than to expect warmth or praise from her mother. Rigantona was not like other mothers. “I might have done better if I had known what to expect,” the young woman added.
“The rituals are mysteries,” Rigantona responded. “Tests, to see how well we face the unknown. Did you cry out?”
“No.”
“Good. Toutorix was worried about you, but I told him no daughter of mine would prove a weakling.” She turned away from Epona and lifted the brooch to the firelight so she could admire its design once more.
Epona started to get a drink of water from the embossed bronze
hydra
on its tripod by the door, a luxury purchased from the Hellenes and now copied in every household in the village, but Alator was there ahead of her, anxious to fill her cup. His eyes glowed with pleasure at being the first to offer a drink to the new woman in the family. Epona smiled at her
younger brother, remembering how she had hurried in the same way to be the first to do a service for their older brother Okelos, when he returned, pale but swaggering, from his man-making.
She longed to wash the sticky blood from her thighs and crawl onto her bedshelf, but there were still rituals to be observed, and her dry throat burned with thirst. She said the customary thanks to the spirit of the water and carefully scattered drops in the four directions before draining the cup. Then her family lined up to congratulate her, and there was a small feast.
She was exhausted, but she would not show it.
Stand tall!
urged the spirit within.
Your new life begins.
E
pona spent the early morning in fitful slumber, never deep enough to be transported into the dreamworld. Instead she wandered through a shadowed place where the real and the unreal melted together and were wrenched apart by something cruel, with an animal’s face. At last she gave up the effort to sleep altogether and sat up on her bedshelf.
It was the first day of her life as a woman.
She ground her fists into her eyes to rub the mist from them.
I wonder if I look different now?
she thought.
Will Goibban like me?
Before leaving her bedshelf she gazed contentedly at the chief’s lodge in which she lived, appreciating it anew after spending the night in the magic house. Her home was a large rectangular hall, built of snugly fitted birch logs and topped with a steep thatched roof. An opening at either end, just below the ridgepole, allowed light and air. As was appropriate for the chosen leader of his people, the house of Toutorix possessed a carved rooftree, its surface covered with intertwining
patterns of life, with symbols for the more powerful spirits, with mystic signs to reinforce authority and fertility. These were carved not only on the downward face of the rooftree, but all the way around, even where they were hidden by the thatch, for they were meant for other than human eyes.
The family’s bedshelves, constructed of tamped and hardened clay, extended down both sides of the lodge, providing sleeping space for more than a dozen people. The shelves were covered with piles of furs and served as seats during the day. Beside them were wooden chests, carved and painted by the craftsmen of the tribe, designed to hold clothing and household articles. Tools, weapons, and the two-horned staff of chiefdom that Toutorix used for refereeing games took up space in the corners. As in all lodges, a firepit occupied the center of the room, with cooking utensils on its stone hearth and a bronze cauldron suspended by iron chains above it.
In a choice location close to the fire stood Rigantona’s wooden loom, towering up into the shadows. Weights hung from each of the vertical warp threads, and the frame was painted with ocher to show the honor in which the premier activity of the household was held. Rigantona herself sat behind the loom, her strong arms moving as energetically as if she had enjoyed a night’s sleep. She did not look up as her daughter got off the bed, but she spoke to her.
“Now that you’re a woman, Epona, you can take my turn in the bakehouse today. I want to get my weaving finished before the traders start coming; it would never do for them to see my family in the same clothes we were wearing last sunseason.”
At the far end of the room Brydda, the young wife of Okelos, was sitting on her bedshelf, playing with her new baby by swinging a string of blue beads in the air above it and laughing when the infant gurgled and cooed. The action distracted Rigantona from her daughter. “Where did you get those beads, Brydda?” she demanded to know.
The girl hesitated. “Okelos gave them to me.”
Rigantona pushed herself away from the loom and stood up. “They look like mine,” she said.
Brydda shifted on her seatbones. “Okelos gave them to me,” she repeated. “I give you my word.” She met Rigantona’s eyes with her own.
Rigantona stopped her advance on the young woman. No one of the people would question the sworn word of another; as everyone knew, words had more magic than weapons. “Very well,” she said, with obvious disappointment. She sighed and turned back to her loom.
During the exchange between the two women. Epona sat on her heels beside her bedshelf and opened her clothing chest. When she raised the lid she stared in astonishment. The brief, coarsely woven tunics of childhood were gone, and in their place, carefully folded, were ankle-length robes she had never seen before. Even in the shadows of the lodge they glowed with bright colors. New clothes. Women’s clothes, of dyed wool and linen instead of the plain undyed fabrics used for children. Rigantona must have put them there while her daughter was in the priest’s lodge.
Epona lifted out a soft red gown and held it up, recalling when that lot of wool had been dyed. “I like a warmer red than this,” Rigantona had remarked, rejecting the material for her own wardrobe. Now Epona gladly slipped the gown over her head and buckled her leather girdle around her waist. Beside her bedshelf were shoes of chewed leather, shoes that remembered the shape of her feet. Shoes she had worn the day before, when she was a child. Would they still know her feet, now those toes belonged to a woman? She slipped into them and smiled to herself; they were the same friends they had always been. Good. She bound them snugly around her ankles with leather thongs so the mud left by melting snow would not suck them off.
Epona possessed only the jewelry appropriate for children, bracelets and anklets of bronze and wood, but she found a new circlet of beautifully engraved copper waiting in the chest, beneath the colored wool. She glanced toward Rigantona, but her mother was once more preoccupied with her loom. Perhaps this ornament had been too small to go around the wrist of the chief’s wife.
She slipped it on and started for the door.
Brydda called, “Wouldn’t you like something to eat? The little children left broth in the pot and here is some of the cheese you like.”
“No, your spirit is generous, but I’m not hungry yet. I just want to go outside for a little while before I go to the bakehouse.”
Brydda nodded. Epona was an adult now. She was responsible for caring for herself and getting her own work done; the others would supervise her no longer. From now on it would be a point of honor with her to see that she completed her share of the labor.
The outside air was so sharp it knifed into Epona’s throat and left the brittle taste of ice on her tongue. She drew breath all the way to the bottom of her lungs and held it, letting it burn, because it would feel so good when she finally exhaled.
Aaahhh.
After the atmosphere of the lodge, thick with the smells of people and food and sleep, a breath of the pine-scented wind was like a drink of honeyed water.
Epona stretched, reaching her arms high and twisting with animal sensuality. The long gown she wore felt strange, bulky. It would seem odd to have her legs covered all the time by skirts.
A pale candescence of light shouldered the mountains as the morning sun finally cleared them. Forested peaks soared skyward, beautiful and free as birdsong, patterned with constantly changing light and shadow and fragrant with conifers. The lake sparkled below, brilliant points of white light rippling on its surface as a breeze moved across it.
I wonder if I look different?
Epona asked herself again. She could have gone back to the lodge and borrowed Rigantona’s polished bronze mirror, but that might start an argument. Fortunately there was a substitute close at hand—the clear dark lake, an intense blue-green in the morning light.
She started across the commonground, headed toward the water.
Drifting smoke carried cooking smells from the lodges,
from meat boiling in bronze cauldrons and barley simmering in water heated by stones from the firepit. Children ran through the village, yelling with the ceaseless energy that characterized all the people. Dogs barked, birds sang overhead, half-wild pigs rooted between the lodges.
Most of the miners had already left for the Salt Mountain, dividing themselves into crews for cutting the rock salt and for felling and placing the timbers to support the galleries within the mine. Few worked in the old copper mine anymore; the salt was more profitable. The last contingent of stragglers was just setting out, the unmarried men who had no wives to urge them off their bedshelves or handclasp them at the doorway. Six or seven of them came across the commonground on a line destined to intersect with Epona’s, their casual banter changing to something else as they approached the girl.
The men of the Kelti were much taller and more powerfully built than the Etruscan and Hellene traders who came to barter for their salt. Fair of skin, they bleached the hair on their heads with lime paste and combed it stiffly back from their foreheads. Their eyes were the color of sky and water, and each man sported a beard of yellow or reddish gold and a heavy, drooping mustache, proud symbol of virility.
The miners were dressed in thick wool tunics, their legs wrapped in fur leggings bound by leather thongs. Mittens of leather and sheepskin caps protected them from the numbing chill within the Salt Mountain. On their backs were leather knapsacks fastened to wooden frames, containing bundles of pine twigs to be burned for illumination within the mine. The chunks of salt from the day’s labor would be carried home through the twilight in those same backpacks.
Each man had a tally stick thrust through his belt, notched to show the number of loads of salt he had brought out of the mine during that moon period. A man of the Kelti could make up a splendid fiction about his sexual prowess—if no quick-tongued woman was nearby to contradict him—or he might invent an astonishing tale of impossible feats on the sports field. But he would not falsify the number of notches
on his tally stick, for that represented his sworn word as to the exact share of the trade goods he was entitled to receive for his efforts. A man who tried to cheat the others of the tribe by claiming more than his due was sent to the spirits in the otherworlds to apologize.
As they drew near Epona the miners’ walk became a swagger, with shoulders thrown back and strong white teeth glinting through their mustaches. They strutted, they grinned, they nudged each other aside in an effort to attract the attention of the newest woman in the valley.
For the first time in her life, Epona saw men looking at her as they did not look at children.
“Hai, Epona!” one of them called. “Sunshine on your head!”
“A day without shadows,” she responded, feeling a flutter of excitement at the base of her throat. At last, the real beginning of her adult life! The men fell into step beside her, crowding close, saying flattering things, patting or pinching her or touching her braided hair. “Now you are a woman, eh? And what a woman! You will steal the light from your mother.”
“That Rigantona was magnificent in her youth,” one of the other miners remarked. “I’ve heard them tell tales of her …” He smacked his lips and his friends laughed. Epona laughed too, a little nervously but enjoying herself. Shyly at first but with growing confidence she responded to their teasing. How delightful this was! A swing entered her walk as if her slim hips had already spread for motherhood. She bounced on the balls of her feet and her laughter rippled across the commonground.
Soon the miners reluctantly turned aside to follow the steep trail to the Salt Mountain. Epona watched them go with regret. Then a vestige of childhood broke through and she burst out in giggles.
Grown men! Flattering me!
There was a bit of swagger in her own walk as she proceeded down to the lake.
To catch a glimpse of her reflection she had to wade into
the icy water far enough to clear the weeds at the shore. She took off her shoes and gathered her skirts in her hands before easing into the shallows, a favorite sport of all the children in warm weather. The weather was not yet that warm, but she did not have to be brave; no one was watching. She gasped and her face twisted as the bitter cold gripped her feet and ankles.
When the worst of it had passed, leaving her lower legs numb, she looked down into the water, waiting for the surface to calm. A blurred image of her own face looked back at her. To her disappointment, it was the same face she had always known: wideset blue eyes beneath level brows, straight nose heavily sprinkled with freckles, curving lips, and a willful little chin. Only her heavy braids looked unfamiliar.
She stooped to peer more closely, hoping to see what the miners admired.
“Epona! Epona, wait for me!”
Her best friend, Mahka, came running down the slope toward her. Mahka, daughter of Sirona, who was married to the chief’s brother Taranis, was a sturdy girl, taller and heavier than Epona, but she had not yet begun the moon-bleeding and her chest was as flat as a boy’s. The time had not come for Mahka’s woman-making.
Epona waded back to shore, feeling the wind chapping her legs. She welcomed the long skirt now. She sat down and began using it to rub her legs and feet.
Mahka flopped down beside her on the damp mud. “I’m waiting. Are you going to tell me about it?”
Epona bent over her reddened feet, massaging them. They felt as if they were being bitten by hundreds of ants. “Tell you about what?”
Mahka laughed. She did not have the deep voice of Taranis, but her voice was low for a woman’s, and always sounded a little hoarse. “You know what I mean—the woman-making. We promised each other long ago that the first one to be made a woman would come back and tell the other what it was like.”
“Oh.” Epona inspected her toes carefully before pulling
on her shoes. Mahka squirmed beside her, radiating impatience.
At last Epona said, “I would tell you if I could, but I don’t know how.” She felt deliciously superior.
“Just start at the beginning. Or at the end; beginnings and ends are all the same, they say.”

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