Daughter of Lir

DAUGHTER OF LIR

The Epona Sequence

Book 3

Judith Tarr

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61138-430-7
Copyright © 2001 Judith Tarr

On the day the Mother’s daughter was born, a storm
battered the city of Lir. Winds tore at its walls and towers. Thunder cracked.
Rain lashed the streets.

She was very young to be the Mother of a city, though not so
young to bear a child. This was her third, and the first that was not a son: a
blessing, and great joy, for a daughter would be Mother in her place, when she
was old and august and had lived the full count of her years. She came to the
birthing knowing she bore a daughter. She sang through the pains, though her
dreams of late had all been dark.

Just as her daughter leaped into the world, the world itself
split asunder. Lightning struck the topmost tower of the temple and cast it
down in ruins. The Mother, secure in the sanctuary below, loosed a great cry,
fierce and shrill above the tumult of heaven.

They laid the child on her hollowed belly, all bloodied and
newborn as it was. In the ringing silence after her cry, the Mother bit through
the cord and bound it with her own hands. But she did not take the small
wriggling creature in her arms. When she reached to do it, the last strength
poured out of her, a gout of blood that wrung a cry from the midwives. She fell
back with a soft sound, neither a gasp nor quite a cry.

The child began to slip from her belly. One of the
priestesses caught it: the youngest, standing startled as if she had not known
what she would do until she had done it.

A murmur passed among the attendants. The young priestess
should not have been there. She was new come to childbed herself, but her son
had scarcely opened his eyes on the world before he shivered and died.

She clutched the baby to her breast, which was full and
aching with new milk. The child nosed, seeking; found the nipple; began to
nurse. She stood transfixed. She made no move to thrust the child away, nor did
anyone move to take it from her.

o0o

The Mother lived, if barely. They had entrusted her life
and spirit to the Goddess whose living image she was. Healer-priestesses tended
her. Even a man had come, one of the sacred dancers, who had a great gift of
making and healing.

The rest of the Goddess’ servants gathered in the heart of the
temple, in the shrine that was as old, some said, as the world. It was round
like the curve of the Goddess’ arms, and full of lamplight. But the shadows
crowded and whispered.

Before the image of the Goddess, squat and holy, the
priestesses knelt in a circle. Chill as it was without, it was warm here, warm
as their bodies. The dim light flickered on bare white shoulders, heavy
breasts, rich swells of haunches.

As close as they seemed, linked arm in arm in their circle,
their eyes on its center were hard and cold. The child lay there in the
youngest priestess’ lap, washed clean of blood and birthing. She was awake; her
eyes were open, dark and oddly focused. She did not cry.

They had taken the omens. They had sung the words, danced
the dance. They had drawn the pattern of the child’s life on the floor,
painting it in red ocher and blue woad and the sweetness of green herbs. Yet
stronger than all that brightness was black earth, earth charred in fire. The
scars of it swept across the rest, overwhelmed it, obliterated it.

“This cannot be Mother,” said the eldest priestess as she
knelt by the broken pattern. “This should not even live.”

“This is the Lastborn, the Stormborn,” said her sister, like
an antiphon in the Goddess’ rite. “This brings the world’s end.”

Voices took up the litany, murmuring round the circle. “We
cannot let this—thing—see the sunlight. It carries our destruction.”

“Sacrifice it here? Expose it on a hillside? Feed it to the
dogs?”

“No.” That voice was clear and strong, though the one who
spoke had seen years enough in both sun and shadow. She was highest of the
priestesses but for the Mother. In the Mother’s incapacity she spoke for the
Goddess, as her living Voice.

She put on no airs. She was a plain woman, thick-legged,
sturdy. She had borne a dozen children, and all of them had lived. Her body
showed the marks of them, on the belly, on the soft heavy breasts.

When she spoke, they all listened. She was the Goddess’ own,
her beloved child. “No,” she said again. “This child will not die. The Goddess
has no thirst for blood.”

“This is bloodthirst incarnate,” the eldest priestess said.
“It clutches death in its hand. Let us give it what belongs to it. Let us end
it now, before it ends us all.”

“No,” the Goddess’ Voice said again. “However ill the omens,
however dark the path ahead of her, the Goddess bids her live.”

“She cannot be Mother,” the eldest priestess said, flat and
hard. “Her heart is darkness. She will destroy us.”

“The Goddess will protect us,” said the Voice. She sighed
and sagged briefly, as if beset with weariness.

The youngest priestess spoke as the Voice paused to gather
strength. Her voice was soft and shy, but the words were clear enough. “I will
take her.” They had all been ignoring her—deliberately, since she took the
child from its mother’s slackened arms, then compounded the fault by suffering
it to drink life from her breast. She would atone for that. She knew it as well
as any. And yet she spoke.

“My son died this morning,” she said. “My heart is empty. My
breasts ache. My man is far away, trading in the southlands, and will not
return until the winter. No one outside the temple knows what has passed here.
If I take her and raise her as my own, and tell her nothing of the truth—might
not the ill things pass us by?”

“The gods know,” said the eldest priestess.

But the youngest had drawn strength and fire from her own
words, and from the small warm creature in her lap. “The Goddess knows. But the
gods and spirits—I took her up in my arms. I gave her her first milk. Let us
cleanse her here, purify her, make her new again. I will name her and hold her
up in front of the people, and she will be my child. We will weave a new fate
for her.”

The priestesses shifted uneasily. “That has never been done
before,” the eldest said. “To lie to the gods—it could bring on us the very
thing we fear.”

“The Goddess wishes her to live,” said the Voice.

“Does the Goddess wish us to die?”

“I only speak for her,” the Voice said. “I don’t pretend to
understand her.”

“I will take the child,” the youngest priestess said again.
“She need not die in the world—only to what she was to have been. She will be
my daughter before the gods and their servants.”

The elder priestesses shook their heads. But the Voice
nodded slowly. “Let it be so,” she said. “Let it be done. Let this child of
blood and war be raised in peace. Let her grow up in gentleness. Let her never
know the darkness that would have claimed her.”

“No more let her know the Goddess’ service,” the eldest
priestess said. “Let her be a child among the Goddess’ lesser children. Let no
choosing of the temple fall upon her, nor great arts be taught her. Let her
know nothing of power or magic. Let her be a simple woman, plain, unremarkable.
Let her live and die in obscurity.”

The youngest priestess bowed her head. She was the first of
her family to be chosen for the temple. She had hoped not to be the last.

Surely there would be daughters of her body. One of them would
go as her mother had gone—and this one, meanwhile, would live. She who had been
born to be Mother and queen would be a simple village child; but better that
than dead upon the altar of sacrifice.

“So let it be,” she said, “in the Goddess’ name.”

The Goddess’ servant came to Long Ford in the spring of
the year, not long after the snows had melted. The river was still running
high, but boats could ride down from the city, and horsemen and lumbering
oxcarts venture the road.

The priestess came in a boat, sitting erect and still with
her acolytes about her. She was not terribly old, but neither was she young.
Her body was heavy with years and childbearing. There was silver in her hair,
but her broad face was smooth. It had no beauty, but it was splendid with
power.

She was one of the great ones, one whose name was taken
away, who spoke and acted for the Goddess in all things. It was a very great
thing to see such a one under the common sky, sailing down the river in the
morning.

Her escort rode just ahead of her on the road by the river.
They were haughty warriors of Lir, mounted on fine horses. Their armor was
hardened leather, their ornaments clashing copper. Each wore a wolfskin for a
cloak.

Their commander gleamed in gold and bronze, and his mantle
was a lionskin. He was highest and most haughty of them all, and his stallion
was magnificent: dappled silver-grey, with a mane like a fall of water, and a
dark brilliant eye.

They looked very much alike, the horse and the rider. Rhian,
watching from the hill above the village, spared a long moment for the
priestess in the boat, but the man on horseback kept catching her eye. He was
young; he carried himself very high, but the nearer he came, the clearer it was
that he was hardly older than she was herself.

This must be a prince of the city. People rode or sailed to
and from Lir in every clear season, but princes did not come this way often.
Not much more often, indeed, than priestesses from the temple.

They were going on past Long Ford, she supposed, on some
embassy of great importance. Nobody ever stopped here. It was a small village,
not poor at all, but not rich, either. There was nothing of note in it, except
a smith who knew how to forge bronze, and once a daughter who had been chosen
to be a priestess in Lir.

She was dead years since. The temple had not summoned
another in her place, not even Rhian who had been her daughter.

A shadow on the spirit had brought Rhian to the hilltop, to
the old fort that was long broken and abandoned, in time to see the priestess
and the prince and the rest. She had dreamed again last night. In the dream she
was a bird, a wonderful bird, a bird with feathers of flame. Her wings were wide.
Her voice was as sweet as all heaven.

But she could not sing. A collar of bronze bound her throat,
crushing the voice from her. The bars of a cage closed about her. She was
trammeled, silent, bound till she could not move.

That dream had haunted her all her life. She had thought
herself inured to it, until she woke gasping, her heart hammering, and no
thought in her but flight.

She was calmer now. The wind was whispering in her ear,
cajoling her, telling her its secrets. Sarai the weaver was with child again,
and this time it would live. The brindled cow had delivered twin calves in the
night. The hunters had found a fine stag and would bring him back come evening.
Bran the smith was thinking of Rhian, and of what they would do in his bed
tonight.

She blushed all over at that. The wind laughed and danced in
the new spring grass. It had better secrets than that. Strong secrets,
wonderful secrets. What the priestesses said in the shrine of the Goddess. What
the warlords said in their hall of weapons in Lir. What the king, the great
warleader, said to the Mother of Lir when they lay together in the long
murmuring nights.

Not, said the wind, stilling for a moment, that they had
said anything for long and long. The Mother was sick. She was dying. They were
all very sad in Lir.

“Is that why the priestess is coming down the river?” Rhian
asked the wind. The chill that shivered across her skin did not come from that
little bit of breeze. This was an older, stronger, colder thing.