The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) (4 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

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“I couldn’t explain it in a way you would understand. Woman-making isn’t like anything you know, Mahka. You’ll just have to wait until your own time comes.”
Mahka doubled her fist and pummeled Epona’s shoulder, hard enough to raise a bruise. Not many of the boys were still willing to fight with Mahka these days; she liked to do damage. “You said you’d tell me. You said! Now you talk just like an adult.”
“I am a woman.”
“You look the same to me,” Mahka told her scornfully. “Except for those braids. They make you look like Rigantona.”
“I will never be like Rigantona; I’m just myself,” Epona declared.
“You’re not my Epona anymore,” Mahka said. “I know how it will be. You won’t play with me anymore, you’ll be sitting at a loom, or talking all the time about lodgefires and linen. We’ll never race again, you and I.”
“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to,” Epona responded hotly. “I can still race you if I want; I’m a free woman of the Kelti.”
“Then race with me now!” Mahka leaped to her feet. “We’ll get Alator and some of the others and race all the way around the village.”
How Epona longed to do just that! To run with thudding feet and laughing lips along the narrow pathway kept smooth for the footraces of the men.
But that would mean giving in; it would mean that Mahka had won and talked her out of her new glory.
She passed her knife hand over her eyes. “No, I will not,” she told the other girl. “I’m going to the bakehouse.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
Epona scrambled to her feet, trying to look eager. “Yes. Just think, Mahka—I’ll get the first bite of the new bread. And maybe I’ll race with you later. If I feel like it.” She squared her shoulders and started up the slope toward the bakehouse, trying to convince herself that this was, indeed, what she wanted.
She had not expected the transition from one life to another to be so difficult. So must the dead feel, gone to the next existence but still looking over their shoulders toward the world they had left.
She walked with firm tread through the village, reminding herself how eagerly she had anticipated thisday. Then the glow from Goibban’s forge caught her eye and she remembered the real reason she had longed to become a woman.
Goibban. The peerless smith of the Kelti.
She turned away from the direction of the bakehouse.
The smith’s forge, constructed to his own design, had a floor and workbenches of hardened clay and a timber framework to support thatched walls and roof. If a random spark ignited the thatch, it was more easily replaced than solid timbers.
A gifted craftsman with copper and bronze, Goibban, while still a very young man, had developed a technique for working star metal. The material had once been available only in small amounts, tiny pure chunks of iron said to have come from the stars themselves. Such precious metal was used for jewelry. Then miners discovered it could be found in many of the territories of the people, in ore like copper or tin. Smiths tried without success to extract the exceptionally strong metal in sufficient quantities and with a workable spirit so it might be used for tools and weapons.
Goibban was intrigued by the problem. The old copper smelters he knew could not attain sufficient heat to melt iron from its ore, so he devised a series of stone-lined pits in which he alternated layers of charcoal with layers of crushed ore, forcing air through the furnaces with a bellows until he had enough heat to melt the ore and squeeze out the spirit of the star metal in its truest form. The spongy mass must then be
kept hot and beaten repeatedly to drive out impurities, the lesser spirits that could cause the iron to lose its courage. The end product was a bar of malleable wrought iron, ready for the anvil.
Goibban had trained apprentices to do the actual smelting, handling the raw ore and working the goatskin bellows and blowpipe that controlled the heat of the fire. This freed Goibban to work with hammer and chisel, creating unbreakable tools and weapons to replace the old bronze ones, and inventing new uses for the iron.
Already his fame had spread beyond the Blue Mountains.
There was usually a cluster of admiring children gathered around the forge, crowding each other for a vantage point to watch the smith at his anvil. When the great hammer crashed down and the sparks flew they oohed and aahed in unison. There was no rival for the drama of watching Goibban turn a bar of iron, glowing at white heat, into an axe head or an axle. Only Kernunnos inspired greater awe. But Kernunnos was a frightening figure to children, while Goibban was patient with them, and kind, so long as they did not get in the way of his work. Goibban was immensely popular with everyone in the village—and as yet unmarried.
There were those who whispered he had given his spirit in marriage to the spirit of the star metal and would never take a wife to be its rival. Goibban himself had said—a saying repeated now around many fires—“Gold is precious, copper is flexible. But the star metal, iron! Hot, it is as soft and graceful as a woman; cold, it becomes as hard and strong as a warrior. Nothing is more worthy of a man’s devotion than iron.”
In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, many women attempted to compete with the iron for the smith’s attention. If a married woman showed interest in Goibban her husband usually encouraged her, for such a lifemaking could bring honor to the family and perhaps a child with the smith’s gift.
On this bright spring morning Goibban was shaping axles for the wagons of Kwelon the oxkeeper. The work was going slowly. Sweat beaded his broad forehead and ran down his
nose, dripping like a melting icicle. The new apprentice had not succeeded in clearing this batch of iron of impurities, and Goibban would have sent it back to the fire if Kwelon had not been so anxious to have the axles. Soon the passes would be cleared of snow; soon wagons must be on their way south, piled high with salt.
Goibban wore little more than a leather apron around his waist because of the heat of forge. His powerfully muscled torso and arms were bare, gleaming with perspiration, as the hammer rose and fell. His whole concentration was on the job at hand, so he was not aware of his customary audience. He did not notice when the cluster of children parted to make way for a new arrival.
He did not even hear Epona the first time she spoke his name. She called again, louder, and he glanced up to see one of his special favorites among the children, a girl who was content to sit quietly for hours, watching him work without interrupting. In return he had made toys and trinkets for her and given her more than one bright blob of metal to play with, metal that should have gone into something more valuable.
She kept his gifts at the bottom of her chest of belongings: special treasures, hidden away and shared with no one. For several seasons she had spun her dreams around them; they had come to represent more than Goibban suspected. When the other children teased her and called her Goibban’s pet she no longer fought them with her fists, but blushed and hid her face, secretly pleased.
Seeing her now, Goibban gave her the little wink that he reserved just for her, and asked quickly, so as not to lose time from work, “What is it, child?”
Epona smiled shyly at him, willing him to see her as the miners had seen her, not as a gawky youngster with freckles like butter forming in the milk.
His eyes took in Epona’s braided hair and long gown, but his mind did not register the fact because it was not pertinent to the forging of the iron. His arm rose and fell, rose and fell, and the sparks showered from the anvil like runaway stars.
Epona tried to think of something womanly and charming to say but the spirit within betrayed her; there was only silence in her head. “Epona, what do you want?” he asked again.
Defeated, she passed her knife hand in front of her eyes in negation. “Nothing. I only … I came to wish you sunshine on your head,” she offered lamely.
“And a day without shadows to you,” he responded kindly, the flicker of a smile crossing his mouth above his golden beard. These children! Then he caught sight of a heavy smear of carbon in the iron, indicative of an unevenness in strength, and he forgot all about Epona.
The girl shoved through the circle of spectators and walked slowly away from the forge, face turned downward, studying her feet.
Something alerted Goibban and he glanced up once more, watching her slender back as she walked away. A long gown? She had been to her woman-making, then? But only yestersun … Perhaps she had come for something important after all. But no, if she had anything to say she would have said it; women of the people always spoke their minds. He shrugged and attacked the iron.
As Epona slouched across the commonground the fragrance of baking bread floated to meet her. Her mouth filled with saliva and she was thankful to remember her day’s task. At least she had a woman’s job, now; not just the incessant woodgathering that any child could handle.
A woman’s job, but not the recognition she sought to go with it.
The radiant morning had lured another from the chief’s lodge. Rigantona had grown impatient with the walls crowding in on her, and as soon as the men and the children had gone their separate ways she was anxious to seek the sun. But first she must dress.
Rigantona never left the lodge without preparing herself to appear as the wife of a great chieftain. The village of the Kelti had become a major stopover on the trading routes since the discovery, many generations ago, of the Salt Mountain,
and important visitors could be expected at almost any time; sometimes even before the passes were clear enough to allow traders’ wagons. Representatives from other tribes of the people came in search of prosperous Kelti wives and joined with Illyrian and Hellene merchants and temperamental Etruscan businessmen in bartering for furs and craftwork and salt.
Always, the salt.
The sunseason was at hand; soon strangers would come and be impressed by the sight of the chief’s wife. But like all the Kelti, Rigantona also dressed to please herself, relishing fine fabrics and jewelry, adoring brilliant colors and soft furs. As every grown woman did, she wore a dagger, almost a shortsword, thrust through her belt, convenient to her knife hand, and she was skilled in its use. As Toutorix’s wife she was entitled to more jewelry than any other woman of the tribe and she liked to array herself in every piece of it: dangling gold earrings, bracelets of bronze and amber, a neckpiece inlaid with coral from Massalia, rings of ivory and copper and star metal, bronze anklets and massive brooches. She braided her hair into a coil atop her head and fastened it in place with a handful of little silver pins. The Kelti believed art central to life, rather than peripheral, and Rigantona took great pride in the fact that every article in her household, no matter how utilitarian, was meticulously crafted and beautifully ornamented, even the smallest hairpin.
She had just finished her toilet when she caught Brydda watching her with undisguised envy.
I earned it all, Brydda,
she thought complacently.
I earned it all.
“Mind the fire,” she instructed the other woman. “I leave its life in your hands. I am going out.” She slung a cloak of blue wool and fox fur across her shoulders and left the lodge.
The clear light dazzled her and she squinted a little. Even after all these seasons, the lambent quality of mountain light surprised her almost as much as it had when she first came to this place from the northern riverlands, to be wife to the chief of the Salt Mountain. Then she had thought she would have everything; a home amid soaring, easily defended peaks
in a village famed for its wealth, and a husband described as the Invincible Boar.
She had not realized then that Toutorix, already a grizzled warrior, had far too many responsibilities as lord of the tribe to pay much attention to a woman, aside from lifemaking, and that every aspect of his person must be shared with the rest of the tribe.
That was the sort of thing a woman discovered too late.
Rigantona noticed her oldest daughter headed for the bakehouse and set off in that direction herself, sniffing the air. At least the pleasures of food never failed one, and it had been a long time since her breakfast of cheese and salted venison with goats’ milk pudding.
She intercepted Epona at the doorway of the earthwalled bakehouse. “Get us a loaf of hot bread to share right now,” she ordered the girl, “and walk with me. My back aches and my eyes are burning.”
“I was just coming to begin our baking …” Epona started to explain, but Rigantona waved her hand. “Later. Yestersun was the last of your childhood, and now I suppose I must talk to you as my mother talked to me. After my own woman-making.” She did not sound enthusiastic about the prospect.
Epona entered the bakehouse and asked Sirona for one of her loaves of bread, fresh from the oven. “My mother requests it,” she explained when Sirona raised her eyebrows. No one refused a direct request from the chief’s wife, even Sirona, whose feud with Rigantona entertained the entire tribe.
When Epona brought the loaf she and her mother strolled through the village, dividing the bread between them, their teeth crunching the grains embedded in the chewy dough. At last they sat together on a boulder near the log palisade. Rigantona stared into space, licking her fingers, trying to recall the words her mother had used on a similar occasion. But that was many summers ago and the memory had turned to smoke and fog.

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