The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) (50 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn)
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“Hai, Dasadas, you know nothing,” Epona said softly. “Kazhak is not dead. And the spirits of those who have made their transition are not necessarily our enemies; Kazhak would not be. But he is not dead,” she repeated.
“How you know?”
She put her hand on her belly. “I know.”
She thought she knew; the feeling was strong in her, but there were times of doubt, nevertheless. She lay on the earth at night and remembered the words of Uiska: “It takes much courage to look into the future, and some of the things to be seen there would scorch your eyes.” But she was
drui;
she had the power. If she truly believed, she could visit the future and see if it was inhabited by a living Kazhak.
Remember the other words of Uiska,
counseled the spirit within:
Learning to resist temptation is part of the discipline of the druii.
Yes,
Epona agreed silently. The shamans had not resisted the temptation to abuse their power and reach out with greedy hands, and only ill would come of it. Whatever pattern governed the lives of the Scythians would be damaged beyond repair, made into something warped and ugly.
But that was not her concern. Her concern was her own tribe. Her people. Her people forever; and she and her baby were going home.
The way was long and hard, but her heart was singing in her every step of it. She felt guided as if by unseen hands. She was as buoyant as though she floated on water. At last she was conforming to the pattern as it pertained to her, and all things would go smoothly now.
She was going home.
They drove the mares to a shallow backwater of the river for grazing and watering, and even as Dasadas and Epona were unsaddling their own horses, they knew they had made a mistake, but it was too late.
The war party came swarming over the crest of a wooded hill and had them surrounded almost before they could put arrows to their bows.
T
hey were Dacians, by the looks of them: hardmuscled, fair-haired men armored with bronze corselets and carrying javelins in addition to their shorts-words. Epona’s first reaction was relief that they were not one of the hybrid bands of robbers that plagued the trade routes, preying on insufficiently guarded merchants.
That relief ebbed quickly. A long-jawed man wearing the plume of leadership on his bronze helmet pointed at her and yelled, “That’s the one, that’s the Kelti woman!” and the others ran toward her.
She and Dasadas worked frantically, fitting arrow to bow and firing as quickly as they could, accurate shots that took down a man with every singing of the bow. But they were outnumbered, and almost a score of Dacians reached Epona and Dasadas, grabbing at the bridles of their horses. They fought hard, with knife and sword now, but Epona was clumsy in her pregnancy and even Dasadas was soon overpowered, though he fought like a man possessed.
Their little herd of mares, spooked by the furor, stampeded up the road and was soon out of sight.
The leader hauled a shaken Epona off her horse. Too late, she regretted that she had not given the gray stallion the kill signal that would have set him lashing out with teeth and hooves at the enemy. It was almost as if the unborn life within her held her back from such close-quarter killing.
“This has to be the woman,” the leader crowed in triumph. As two of his men held her he snatched the felt cap from her head and let her hair tumble free. “Reddish-blond and big with child,” he said, with satisfaction. “She answers the description that farmer gave us.”
“What farmer? What is this about?” Epona demanded to know. She would not let them see her be afraid.
“You healed the lame pony of a man who gave you food and water in return, and held some mares for you in his pen,” the Dacian told her. “And that farmer talked, oh, yes, he was delighted to talk. You made quite an impression on him.”
As her pregnancy advanced, her disguise as a Scythian man had became quite impossible, and Epona had recently, reluctantly, abandoned it altogether. Now it was too late for regrets, however. Someone would have spotted her anyway, she knew that as soon as the Dacian explained his reason for seeking her.
“There is a price on your head south of here, woman,” he told her. “A Thracian, one Provaton, has talked of little but you for a year or more. His uncle, who is a wealthy horsebreeder, I understand, even financed a little expedition to the east in search of you but nothing came of it—except they encountered some Scythians who relieved them of their horses and their heads.
“But you are known, Kelti woman, and there is talk of you at every horse fair and trading center where stockmen meet. When it was rumored that you had been seen in this region, my men and I decided to go into business for ourselves, you might say. We will get a good price for you; you will be the most valuable slave auctioned this seasons, eh, men?” He glanced over his shoulder at his comrades, grinning, sharing
his victory with them as he would divide the price they would get for her, and in that moment when he was distracted Epona leaped at him.
Her movement startled the two men who held her just enough to allow her to pull free of their grasp. They immediately grabbed for her again, but by this time Dasadas was waging his own small war with knife and Kelti sword, taking advantage of Epona’s diversion to break free of his own guard. No one expected a pregnant woman to move so swiftly or fight so fiercely. Epona did not strike to kill, now; she only slashed and cut to get through the men surrounding her and reach the gray stallion, who miraculously had not fled after the mares, as had the bay of Dasadas.
When the men closed around her again she whistled shrilly and the horse answered her, obedient to the command. His attack was as unexpected as her own, and the men of the Daci backed away from his rearing body and flailing hooves. Epona leaped for him, feeling one of his knees strike her unintentionally in the belly, and with a desperate heave she caught him by the mane. He whirled instantly and broke through the circle of men. Epona, half-running beside him, unable to pull herself onto his back, clutched his mane and gritted her teeth. Then Dasadas was with her, shouting something, shoving against her with his shoulder, and she was draped across the stallion’s back with the yelling Scythian behind her, covering her body with his own. The Dacians recovered quickly and ran after them, hurling their javelins, but afoot they could not hope to equal the speed of the horse.
Epona heard Dasadas grunt once, an anguished sound, and felt the thud of something strike his body, but he did not fall.
The gray lowered his head and pinned his ears flat against his head, running away from his attackers, running after the younger stallion who had taken off with his mares. He had remained, as he was taught, with his rider, held by an invisible chain, but now that chain was broken and nothing could restrain him. A rival had stolen his mares; that was his only thought.
He had run so far and so fast that the Dacians were mere
specks in the distance before Epona was able to pull herself upright in the saddle and haul on the flying reins, and then she had to fight with all her strength to slow the stallion appreciably.
Dasadas was lying against her, his arms clutching her body, his head bobbling against her back as if he had no control over it. There was a dreadful lancing pain in her own belly and spots of light danced in front of her eyes, but she could not surrender; not yet, not until they were all safe.
They came to a wooded area with the dense underbrush resulting from centuries of alternate slash-and-burn cultivation and abandonment. Epona succeeded in fighting the stallion to a halt, then turned him aside into the woods. Still he whinnied incessantly, calling after his mares.
She slid from his back and tied him securely to a tree, then sank onto the earth, dizzy and sick. Dasadas still sprawled on the horse’s back, and when the stallion fidgeted and danced, fighting his tether, the Scythian slid to the ground with a sound like that of a sack of meal falling.
Epona crawled over to him. There was an ugly bleeding wound in his side and the broken point of a javelin was embedded there. When he breathed, she could hear a rattling in his chest, and see bloody bubbles form and break in his open mouth.
“Dasadas. Dasadas!”
He opened his eyes weakly and stared up, but he did not seem to see her.
The pain in her belly was getting worse; it had spread to her back, and felt like a hand squeezing. Dasadas ran his tongue over his lips and made a sound that could have been a request for water.
Epona slumped down onto the earth mother. There was nowhere else to go; nothing to do. She was suddenly very tired, her bones limp within her flesh. She pressed her face into the earth, smelling dirt and moss and dead leaves, and waited.
And strength came back to her, a little at a time.
At last she was able to get to her hands and knees, and
then, shakily, to her feet, and follow the distant sound of running water. At a tiny, icy stream she knelt and bathed her face until she felt better, then soaked the bottom of her old woolen Kelti gown with water until she had enough to carry back and squeeze into Dasadas’ open mouth. When she was stronger, she would fill the one empty waterbag the stallion carried, and they would ride on in search of the other horses.
If Dasadas would be able to ride on.
You will die with blood in your mouth beside a muddy river
, Kernunnos had once said.
Dasadas was badly wounded, there was no doubt of it, and the injury was not amenable to the techniques she knew. She searched for yarrow to pack his wound, but found none. She put her hands on his body and concentrated, reaching out with her spirit for help, but felt no answering flood of strength.
My gift is not for my own kind
, she thought sadly.
It only works with animals.
And then the pain came again, stabbing her so savagely she doubled over, forgetting everything else, and lost herself in swirling stars and hot, sticky darkness.
When she next opened her eyes it was twilight, and her head was in Dasadas’ lap. The Scythian had recovered enough to prop his back against a dead tree, and he was gazing down at her with anguish. “We are hurt, Epona,” he managed to say.
“You are wounded. I am … I think I am going to have the baby, Dasadas.”
His eyes flared open. “Here? Now? But Dasadas cannot help you. Weak …” He broke off to cough, as if to prove his statement. “Dasadas does not know how to birth a child.”
“It is not a thing men need to know,” Epona told him.
A
gutuiter
should have been there, to hold her hands and steady her as she squatted in the birth posture, and to sing the song of welcome for the new spirit. When the birth was concluded, the
gutuiter
would have helped her lie down and put the naked, bloody newborn on its mother’s belly, so the strong muscles within her could contract in acknowledgment of their completed task and be healthier for the next birth.
With the aid of the
drui,
skilled in the arts of summoning life, the baby might have had a chance to live.
But there was no
drui,
no Nematona with her herbs and teas, no Uiska of the soft voice. There was only pain and dizziness, and Dasadas’ useless, frightened fumbling as he fought off his own weakness.
And when it was over, Kazhak’s dead son, born too soon to survive in this way, lay on the earth mother, and Epona wept over him as she had never wept in her life.
Dasadas went back to the tree against which he had lain, and buried his face in the crook of his arm. The gray stallion, nervous at the smell of blood, pawed the earth and thought about his missing mares.
They buried the child at the foot of an oak tree. Epona returned the small spark to the great fire with whispered words of transition; Dasadas commemorated its passing by slashing his arms and earlobes, losing precious blood he could not spare in his weakened condition, but Epona did not criticize him for it.
She knew that he blamed himself for this loss. Again and again, he muttered words of self-castigation. “Dasadas did not fight good enough; Dasadas has failed Epona.” He would not be comforted, and though she ached to spend her own grief, she had to set that aside and try to deal with his.
Then, too, there was the matter of the Dacians. “They will be here soon,” Dasadas told her. “They will track us; they mean to have you, Epona. We must go.”
“You are too badly hurt to ride, Dasadas.”
“What about you? But is no choice. We must somehow get on gray horse, or stay here and be captured. We could not fight free this time.”
No, she agreed, they could not escape again. She found moss and sweet grass to pack her body and hold back the bleeding, and she bandaged Dasadas’ side as best she could with fabric torn from her clothing. They refilled the waterbag and tried to eat something for strength, but neither had the appetite for it. They were not able to travel, but they must.
And so they did.
Crawling onto the horse was a nightmare of pain, and the fainting sensation that followed was worse, but somehow the man and the woman rode the gray horse, and turned his head northward. He was only too glad to go. His instinct, and then his ears and nose, told him where the mares and the bay stallion waited, grazing peacefully in a hidden meadow, and he set off after them with only nominal guidance from the half-unconscious woman holding his reins.
Epona looked back at the grave beneath the oak tree. It was such a little mound in sun-dappled shade. She did not even have the amber necklace to leave with her son. It had gone to pay for a horse.
All the pain was not in her body.
“Find them,” she whispered to the stallion, leaning over his neck. “Find them.”
The missing mares and the bay stallion of Dasadas were responsible for the fact that the Dacians had not caught Epona, though she was unaware of it as she rode through a blur of grief and discomfort, doing the impossible because there was nothing else to be done. The Dacians were a fighting unit, returning from skirmish warfare at the edge of their territory, one of the constant battles they enjoyed with the neighboring Scordisci. They were not experienced at hunting and tracking, and the confusion of hoofprints left by the fleeing mares confused them. They never noticed when the stallion’s prints veered off to the west, toward the glade where Epona and Dasadas lay attempting to recover.
The Dacians had followed the mares until they realized the hopelessness of catching loose horses in open land, and then they reluctantly abandoned the quest. “We will catch up with that woman some other time,” the leader promised his men. “A woman that far gone—someone will see her. Someone will mention her. And those horses will be hard to hide; big horses, they were, good Thracian stock. What do you suppose she’s doing with them up here?”
The gray stallion knew where his mares were and he carried Epona and Dasadas to them unerringly. The young bay, hearing him approach, whinnied a warning to the encroaching
male, but Dasadas managed to rouse himself enough from his own suffering to call a command to his horse and the bay did not attack the gray. The two animals glared at each other, necks arched and nostrils flaring, while Epona dismounted and caught Dasadas’ horse, then helped him to mount.

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