The Horse Goddess (Celtic World of Morgan Llywelyn) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.”
    “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