Celtika (4 page)

Dangerous! And though I had admitted my own nature to her, as I would admit it to anyone—that I was a simple shaman, all of whom lied about their age and skills—she had somehow seen behind the lie. She knew I was no ordinary shaman. She had seen a skull peering through my face. She had recognised me as ‘one of those who walks the Path’. She had raw talent. I would need to be careful in speech and behaviour from now on.

My second consideration was the simple familiarity of the woman, and I suspected that this, too, would be the subject of her own question to me.

After a while I asked her, ‘What was your mother’s name?’

‘My mother? She was named for the blue of the lake in high summer. Why do you ask?’

‘What was your grandmother’s name?’

‘My grandmother was named for the frost that glitters on the branches in the dead of winter. Why do you ask?’

‘And your great-grandmother?’

Niiv hesitated before answering, not looking at me. The beasts struggled and snorted as they ploughed through the snow.

‘The same as my mother. Why do you ask?’

‘And your great-grandmother’s … grandmother?’

‘My great-grandmother’s grandmother? How curious you are, Merlin. How strangely curious. My great-grandmother’s grandmother was named for the mist that hangs in the trees in autumn.’

‘Little Meerga,’ I whispered, but said aloud, ‘You have a long memory.’

‘We don’t forget,’ Niiv agreed. ‘All my grandmothers watch me from the bosom of the Northland Mistress. Why are you asking me all this?’

‘You remind me of someone.’

Niiv laughed. ‘Not little Meerga. She died two hundred winters ago.’

‘I know.’

Little Meerga. Mist Lady. I watched Niiv ride and remembered her ancestor; it was so obvious to me now, now that I had placed the connection. The eyes were the same, the laugh was the same, the provocative way of riding was the same. The spark of outrage was the same.

I was sad for a while, though I couldn’t help laughing when I remembered my first encounter with the woman whose descendant—my own descendant, my own great-something-grand-daughter—now rode ahead of me …

*   *   *

Meerga was fragrant and knowing as she slipped into my tent, accompanied by her sister. I was excited at the prospect of the encounter—though not the look in her eyes when she first glimpsed me. Her sister, who was even more appalled at the sight of me, asked her several times if she was sure about what she was doing. Meerga reassured and dismissed her sister, then again looked doubtful herself.

We took a drink and ate some pieces of fish, sitting on opposite sides of the small fire whose flame cast a pleasant glow on her pale face. Something must have warmed her, though probably not my conversation, because suddenly she stood, invited me to stand, then began to undress.

Below her woollen cloak she was wearing a red and blue patterned dress of fine linen; the aroma of bluebells drifted from the fabric. She slipped the shoulder knots and let the dress fall away, to reveal an undergarment of white, gauzy material that was heady with the scent of spring flowers. The dried petals had been sewn into the seams, to make a pattern of circles around her body. She was very beautiful and she watched me through wide, blue eyes as she deftly untied the bows at the shoulder. The undertunic fell to reveal a garment of gossamer thinness, from which came the scent of rosewater mixed with the fragrance that excites, the aroma that has nothing to do with flowers.

She started to lift this final garment above her thighs, then teased me: ‘Aren’t you going to shed some of that fur?’

‘Well, if you’re sure.’

I slipped my wolfskin cloak from my shoulders, kicked it away, revealing my deerskin shirt and trousers. Though the trousers were loose around the groin, for obvious reasons, the shirt had congealed to the undergarment I wore, whose nature at that moment I couldn’t remember. I dropped the trousers and noticed Meerga’s shocked glance, then looked down and shared her shock.

I had washed all my clothes in the sacred river of the Aeduii, a tributary of the great river Daan. Thoroughly washed them! Then again, that had been in summer—I wasn’t sure which summer precisely—and in a much warmer country. I’d simply not noticed the decay.

I apologised, then used my flattened palm like a blade to separate shirt from vest; the pungent aroma of fungal spores and sweat mingled with Meerga’s roses. It was a quite pleasant combination, I thought. But she had put her hand over her mouth, speaking through her fingers. ‘Do you have any skin under there?’

‘I’m sure I do…’

The vest came away eventually, though it tore at areas where insects had burrowed. I’d not noticed them until now, and now they hurt as they bled. Naked, I stared down at a body that had been conquered and ransacked by a world that had nothing to do with the kings, armies and the greed of my own kind.

‘I’m sure I can do something about this…’ I started to say, but a gust of cold air announced Meerga’s appalled departure, overcoat flung carelessly round her shoulders.

But she came back an hour or so later, with various ointments and mosses, and set about cleaning me up. And at some time during the night, her daughter was conceived, though I had long since left the lakeside when the girl came into the world, and the line that led to Niiv had been commenced.

The laugh and the look; it had remained over two hundred winters …

*   *   *

I decided not to reveal this insight to the girl, so I simply said, ‘But you wanted to ask me a personal question in return? Ask away.’

‘Thank you,’ Niiv said as we rode on slowly through the forest of birch. She seemed disappointed that the previous exchange had ended. ‘But now isn’t the time. I’ll ask you later. When we’ve reached the lake. I hope you’re prepared for the question.’

‘All my life I’ve felt prepared for everything except riding reindeers. So if your question is do I like reindeers, the answer is no. And if your question is do I like what I’m eating, certainly not. Do I like watching you ride? Yes. I like watching you ride.’

She laughed quietly at that, I noticed.

‘Do I wish I was back in the warm climate by the blue seas that lie to the south of here? Most definitely. Would I like to become the father of your unborn child? Now
there’s
a question.’

‘But not the question I want to ask you,’ Niiv said instantly, with not a flinch or twitch or hint of anger at my presumption as she guided her buck through the snow.

‘But would I, though…’ I mused.

‘But would you, though,’ she teased.

‘I don’t know the answer.’

‘Nor do I. As I said: it wasn’t the question.’

She glanced back with what I imagined was an impish smile, though the night and her woollen mask exposed nothing but a torchlit twinkle in her eyes. The rest was imagination.

And the itching on my bones made me long to scratch below my filthy cloak.

*   *   *

Because I had been anxious to get on, and because my companions were also young, we came to the lake after only five periods of sleep. I was starving, as was Niiv whose excitement and boldness had grown as we had neared her home, and the wind was from the south and the smells of cooking were almost irresistible.

Nevertheless, the woman instructed Jouhkan and me to stay where we were, among the sparse trees, while she ran quickly towards the glow of the fires we could see ahead of us.

Jouhkan was scratching his strong, yellow beard. ‘There’s something up,’ he muttered. ‘Probably a new arrival. She has a nose for these things. Even before the Northland’s Mistress gave her a new set of nostrils!’

If that was true, then she had a better nose than I. All I could smell on the breeze was food, piss, sweat and reindeers. And the tangy aroma of a fruit, a yellow berry that grew all through the long Pohjolan night, a fragrant if tiny piece of magic in the dark. Jouhkan’s comment added to my conviction that Niiv herself had been born talented in sorcery. Although at first at a very simple level, she was now like a briar rose, growing out of control. I was very much on my guard with her.

Niiv came scampering back, her head exposed, fair hair flowing, her skirts caked with snow. She was breathless and unhappy and the moment she reached me she touched ungloved hands to my face, staring at me.

‘They’re Galliks,’ she said. ‘Apparently very dangerous. I don’t know them, but there are other visitors who do. They are nicknamed “quill-heads” because of what they do to their hair. Do you know them?’

Galliks? Quill-heads? I knew them well enough. Lime-streaked hair, stiffened in battle like frosted wood or stripped feathers, bodies painted with the faces, eyes and members of their ancestors, voices trained to shout above the sound of falling water, arms strengthened to allow them to hold their full body weight by one hand as they flung themselves out from their chariots, clinging to the knotted mane of their galloping horse. Yes, I knew them well enough. The Greeklanders called them
keltoi.

Galliks,
keltoi, bolgae,
Celts, they were known by so many names, and all had names for their tribes and great clans based on deeds, or creatures, or ancestors, or visions. They were a widespread and confusing people, usually hospitable, highly honourable. How dangerous they would turn out to be depended from where, in the western lands they dominated, this particular group had come.

‘When did they arrive?’

‘Some time ago, while I was singing with Louhi. They seem to be very unhappy.’

‘What are they looking for?’

‘What are
you
looking for? What is anybody looking for? The same thing in different guise. This place attracts madness and hope as warm skin attracts a mosquito. Please be careful of them. They’ve already made threats against a neighbouring camp. They’ve set up their own tents close to my village.’

And then she gave me that look again, the look that said
I know you!
And she knew that I was older than my face, and she smiled, adding, ‘I think you should ask for lodgings with those brutes. If you could persuade the
rajathuks
to let you pass into Pohjola, you might be able to persuade the Galliks to keep their iron dry.’

Certainly I would seek lodgings with them—they might well be useful to me, and I was familiar with most of their dialects. First, though, I had to pay a call on an old friend.

*   *   *

The frozen lake was far wider than I’d remembered. Its forested shore was alive with fire, fifty camps or more, hundreds of fires burning and cooking and warming the black of night, away into the distance. The ice stretched out before me, marked and patterned through the long winter by shamans trying to fathom its secrets. Even now, out in the midnight gloom above the frost, I could see naked figures moving and dancing, skating and crawling, some of them beating at the great lid of frozen water that separated them from the world of ghosts, ships and ancient offerings at the bottom of the wide mere. Several tall, grey, indistinct figures stood motionless in a circle at the centre of the lake.

The surrounding woods were eerie ghosts in the starlight, their shapes silvering when the moon rose, sometimes shimmering when the falling veils of light in the north streamed at their most brilliant. The roots of these woods sucked the spirits from the lake. They bristled with the past, whispered with lost voices. This lake was one of several places that touched into distant Time itself. What I sought might as easily be in one of these massive birches, or in a copse of thorn, as in the old ship in the lake mud, far below the ice.

I listened for hours, listened for the scream of desperation, the howling voice calling for what it had lost. But the lake, for now at least, was silent.

Time would tell, though time was in short supply. With spring would come danger.

*   *   *

Later, I approached the two squat tents erected by the
keltoi.
A single man crouched in his furs, guarding the entrance to the crude enclosure. He eyed me suspiciously, asking my name and my business, and from his dialect I placed him as coming from the edge of the world itself, the Island of the Dead which I knew as Ghostland, though Alba was its more familiar name.

This island was close to the land of my birth. Its high places were marked with the same stones and spirals. Its caves stank of the same earth, the same dreams. For reasons I hadn’t begun to understand, the dead accumulated there, hiding in its forests and at the sources of its rivers, the vast domain of Ghostland, at the island’s heart. Many tribes lived on the border of this domain, protected by old and powerful defences against the spirits which walked, rode and fought there. Alba was a strange island, a place in which I did not feel comfortable, which is why I visited it rarely.

A stretch of water separated the white chalk cliffs of the island from the white cliffs at the edge of the huge land where I walked my path, but the men who prowled those sea-carved edges often signalled to each other using sunlight on their shields. In good weather and calm seas, small ships crossed the straits, and some of them managed to return.

I was allowed access to the fire inside the tent and found a chieftain, four of his retinue of warriors, and two
druidi,
the priests or sorcerers of the
keltoi.

These island men were gruff in their speech, very crude in tongue, welcoming in their hospitality—I was invited immediately to share the tent and the food, payment to be discussed later—but each carried a severed head in a leather bag, and each took pleasure in showing me his trophy. The smell of the cedar oil was stimulating. The chieftain claimed that the grim skull he himself carried would sometimes sing to him of triumphs to come.

The men addressed these heads as if they were friends, asking forgiveness for closing them up again in their sacks at the end of a conversation, but food had to be taken.

I had seen this many times before, and not just with the strange Alba islanders.

The
druidi
were in disgrace, I was soon told. They had tried several times to penetrate the ice to find some lost and significant object from their chieftain’s land, and failed. Now they sat, sullen and thoughtful, away from the warlord. They were trim-bearded and crop-haired, though each had a single, long plait hanging from the left temple. They wore new deerskin trousers and thick fleece jackets. The older man had a splendid gold half-moon breastplate, a
lunula,
slung around his neck. They were both better dressed than the warriors, who sat huddled in brightly patterned cloaks, woollen trousers and long, beaten leather boots that were now quite rank in odour.