the Year the Horses came Read online

  The Year the Horses Came

  A NOVEL

  Mary Mackey

  Copyright © Mary Mackey, 1993

  All Rights Reserved

  First published by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  For A.W.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I owe a special debt of gratitude to novelist Sheldon Greene, who with his usual unfailing patience read every version of this novel in manuscript. His suggestions and criticisms were invaluable. Special thanks also to Angus Wright, Joan Marler, Janine Canan, Vicki Noble, and Martha Wood and to Keith Alger and Cristina Alves, who loaned me their computer while I was in Brazil.

  I was originally inspired to write a novel about Old Europe after reading The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. These ground-breaking works turn back time and give substance to an entire world of goddess-worshiping people whose civilizations have been almost entirely ignored or misinterpreted. As I began my research, Professor Gimbutas was kind enough to meet with me and answer many questions. Although I subsequently consulted numerous sources on the European Neolithic, the encouragement she gave me and the information she so generously shared were priceless.

  A Note on the Ecology of Old Europe

  In the Fifth Millennium B.C.E., Europe was warmer and wetter than it is today. Human beings had only begun to clear the great forests that stretched from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, and even the hills of Greece were covered with broad-leafed evergreens. In some regions, Brittany, for example, sea level may have been as much as thirty-five feet lower than it is at present, which means that many of the places where Marrah and her people lived can no longer be found on our maps. Lions ranged over much of the continent until well into the early part of the Middle Ages, but horses, which had died out during the drastic changes in climate that followed the last glacial period, were unknown until they were reintroduced from southern Russia and eastern Ukraine at about the time this story begins.

  Table of Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE ECOLOGY OF OLD EUROPE

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY MARY MACKEY

  PROLOGUE

  Pieces of a Broken Vase

  There was a time out of memory when the Goddess Earth lay sleeping under a shining blanket of ice. In those times human beings fled south to find shelter from the wind, and many lands were hidden. One day the Goddess began to wake. Her glaciers melted, and bright streams of clear water ran everywhere. Flowers bloomed on slopes where no flowers had bloomed for countless generations, and the world was dizzy with the scent of the Great Spring. But human beings were frightened. They had grown used to their frozen world, and the melting was a terror in their hearts. "How shall we live now that the great beasts we have always hunted are disappearing?" they cried. Hearing their prayers, the Goddess Earth took pity on them and sent three of Her daughters to teach them new ways. To some, the Divine Sisters taught the art of fishing, to others the arts of weaving and pottery making, and to others the magic of taming animals and planting grain. So for over two hundred generations human children lived in peace and prosperity, praising the Goddess Earth and calling Her by many names.

  A TEACHING STORY OF THE SHARATANI PEOPLE

  BLACK SEA COAST, FIFTH MILLENNIUM, B.C.E.

  Live together in love and harmony.

  Cherish children.

  Honor women.

  Respect old people.

  Remember that the earth and everything on it is part of the living body of your Divine Mother.

  Enjoy yourselves, for your joy is pleasing to Her.

  THE SIX COMMANDMENTS OF THE DIVINE SISTERS

  Lift Her up!

  Lift the Great Owl

  who blesses us all.

  Lift Her up

  so the dead can rest

  under Her wings.

  Lift Her up!

  Worship Her with your strength.

  SONG FOR RAISING A GODDESS STONE

  SUNG BY THE SHORE PEOPLE AT THE FEAST OF THE DEAD

  BRITTANY, FIFTH MILLENNIUM B.C.E.

  The Year the Horses Came

  BOOK ONE

  * * *

  The West Beyond The West

  The beastmen breathed fire.

  They ate whole cities;

  they turned the green womb of the world to ash.

  "Rise up!" the Goddess cried to Sabalah.

  "Rise up, for I've given you

  a thrice-blessed child.

  She will be a great priestess.

  She will travel far.

  She will heal her people

  like a warm spring rain.

  Her name is Marrah,

  the Seagull of Shara,

  Marrah of dark eyes

  and wind-tossed hair.

  "The beastmen are coming to steal your daughter.

  Rise up and save her before it's too late."

  FROM "SABALAH'S DREAM"

  A MEMORY SONG: CITY OF SHARA

  BLACK SEA COAST, FIFTH MILLENNIUM B.C.E.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Coast of Brittany: 4372 B.C.E.

  On the day she was to become a woman, Marrah opened her eyes just as the first pale fingers of light were coming in through the smoke holes of her great-grandmother's longhouse. For a moment she experienced a sensation of swimming up from a great depth as if her soul were pursuing her body back to the waking world, but then she remembered what day it was, and suddenly she was wide awake.

  She wondered anxiously if it was still raining. Yesterday, just before dark, a big storm had blown in from the north. All evening the rain had fallen in torrents and huge gray breakers had crashed against the beach, shaking the earth with such a deafening roar that people had to yell to make themselves heard. Amonah, Goddess of the Sea, had sent the white foam of Her hair blowing on the wind until you couldn't tell the water from the land, and there had been a scramble to pull the fishing boats up beyond the reach of the waves and fill them with stones before She claimed them as Her own.

  Marrah held her breath and listened for the telltale sound of rain in the thatch. If the weather had not cleared overnight, her coming-of-age ceremony would have to be postponed for a whole month until the moon was full again. No doubt this would be just the lesson in patience that Great-Grandmother Ama was always suggesting she needed, but hardly the sort of thing a girl who was about to become a woman could be expected to look forward to. There were only two times in your life when everyone in the community got together to dance and feast in your honor. One was the day you became an adult and the other the day your bones were laid to rest with the bones of your ancestors. Given a choice, Marrah would have much rather had it rain on her funeral.

  The thatch above her head seemed to be rustling softly. Was it rain or wind? Wind, she decided, and her heart leapt with joy. Wind, not rain at all! And no great breakers crashing against the shore either; only the gentl
e sound of the surf, so constant, so much a part of her life that she would have been lost without it. The Goddess Amonah had heard her prayer, all praise to Her!

  She stretched, sat up cautiously, and looked around the sleeping compartment. To her right, her eight-year-old brother, Arang, was sleeping soundly, curled carefully around his straw bird mask. Arang was going to be a water rail in the bird dance the Society of Children was putting on this evening, and he had spent the past month standing on one foot, practicing his dips and bobs while his best friend, Kopeta, beat out the rhythms for him on a toy drum. He was a small child with soft dark hair, long eyelashes, and rosy cheeks, and he always looked sweet when he was asleep, but if she woke him up, he'd follow her and probably tease her and she wasn't in the mood for teasing this morning.

  On the other side of Arang, Sabalah lay on a pile of sheepskins, her head resting on the shoulder of her partner, Mehe, who was snoring softly, his beard rising and falling with every breath. Marrah inspected Sabalah's face to make sure she was really asleep. It was a face very much like her own, and she had often thought with pride that anyone looking at the two of them would have known at once they were mother and daughter. There were lines around Sabalah's eyes and mouth, like tiny cracks in a fine glaze, but except for these marks of age, both she and Marrah had the same delicate features: long slender noses, high cheekbones, full lips, and heavy black hair, although Marrah's hair was more curly than her mother's. Instead of resting in a neat coil on the nape of her neck the way Sabalah's did, Marrah's hair hung down her back in a thick mane. She looked like someone who traveled quickly, a girl who "rode the back of the wind," as the Shore People put it: courageous, perhaps a little rash, but young yet and untested. There were hints in the firmness of her jaw and the directness of her gaze that in time, perhaps, she might settle down and become as powerful and respected a priestess as her mother, but at thirteen she was hungry for adventure and not too particular how she got it.

  Reassured that no one else would wake up for some time yet, she rose to her feet and retrieved her dress from a wooden peg. The dress was the only piece of clothing she owned, a simple long-sleeved shift of soft deerskin that hung from her shoulders to mid calf. Later in the day she would wear a fine ceremonial skirt of imported linen that belonged to the temple, but leather was the stuff of everyday wear, sometimes embroidered with beads and shells but more often plain.

  Barefoot, she tiptoed across the sleeping compartment and stepped out into the main part of the house. It was not the largest in the village, no more than seventy by twenty paces and home to only seven families, but it was comfortable and well built, timbered with oak, thickly thatched, and walled with tightly woven hazel rods packed with hardened clay. Roughly rectangular in shape, the long-house had doorways at either end, both closed at the moment by leather curtains battened down with wooden poles. When the wind blew hard, as it had last night, the curtain battens were reinforced with stones. Marrah checked and noted with relief that all the stones were still in place. All seven of the central hearths were blessedly unoccupied, without so much as a sign that anyone had gotten up yet to throw fresh wood on the fires. Not even baby Seshi was awake. Izirda must have already nursed him and gone back to sleep.

  The coast was clear. Tiptoeing to the western door, she picked up the stones, laid them carefully to one side, pulled back the curtain, and stepped outside onto a broad path of finely crushed white shells. Zakur and Laino, two of the village dogs, rose to meet her, but since they had known her since they were puppies, they did so quietly. They were large and shaggy with a lot of wolf blood in their veins; if she had been a stranger they would have sounded an alarm that would have awakened everyone.

  She stood for a moment, scratching the dogs behind their ears and looking at the sleeping village. There were few prettier sights in the world than Xori just before sunrise. Its six longhouses had been built in a bend in the shoreline, partially sheltered from the worst of the sea winds. They lay in two rows of three each, with a small temple at one end, a wooden platform at the other, and a large space in the middle for ceremonies and festivals. It was a rare month when a feast wasn't cooked in the big stone-lined fire pit, a rare week when the feet of dancers weren't stamping on the seashell pavement, a rare night when the drums and pipes weren't playing. Life in the village was religious and ceremonial. The Shore People praised the Goddess Earth by eating well, singing beautifully, enjoying themselves, and making love, and if Marrah had been told that people existed who worshiped their gods by suffering she would have found it unbelievable.

  Behind the village lay the fields, surrounded by living fences of plaited thornbushes reinforced in places with mud and wattle. They were not large, for although the people of Xori ate grain, they lived for the most part on the bounty of the sea. Still, they worked their fields carefully, putting seaweed on the land to keep it fertile, and the land, although rather stony, rewarded them. Marrah could see the first green haze of new growth: the delicate sprouts of wheat and chick-peas and lentils and, behind them, apple trees in full blossom. Beyond the orchard were the corrals. The cows and goats were already up and about, ready to be milked and led to the tide flats to graze on salt grass, but the pigs were nowhere in sight. She wondered if the pigs were sleeping late this morning.

  Behind the fields was the forest, looking blue and mysterious in the early morning light. Here the wilderness began, for although there were many settlements along the coast, the interior was mostly a dense mix of oak, pine, and hazel, crisscrossed by wild animal tracks and a few trails that led north to the place where stone for axes was quarried. There was something brooding and animal-like about the forest that always made Marrah feel there were great adventures to be had in it. The hunters of the village stalked and killed red deer there, but they never went too far from the sea. She had often thought that someday, when she was older, she would go right through the center and find out what lay on the other side.

  A fine mist was streaming off the trees and freshly planted fields, making the earth seem smoky and insubstantial, but the day was unusually fresh and brightening without a cloud in the sky. She finished petting the dogs, put her hands on her hips, and smiled. She felt as if the world were hers, as if the village and all its people and the day itself had been given to her as a present. There was no sign of the storm. To her left, she could see small waves running gently up the white sand like polite guests coming to wish her good luck. It was an auspicious day, the perfect sort of day to become a woman.

  At the far end of the settlement, the Goddess Stone was just catching the first watery-pink rays of the sun, but the small, round wooden temple at the base was still in the shadows, like a black egg at the feet of a giant owl. Twenty hands high and more or less wedge-shaped, the Goddess Stone had been hewn out of gray-white granite so long ago that no one living could remember the day She was raised. At the top, Her large round owl eyes looked in both directions. There was not a village of the Shore People that did not have a similar stone, and She was not big compared to the greater Goddesses who stood in rows at the City of the Dead in Hoza, but Marrah never saw Her without a feeling of kinship. Her name was Xori, like the village itself. Xori meant "bird," and since Marrah's name meant "seagull," she had always imagined that she and the Goddess Stone were linked by a special bond.

  "Give me a good flight," she said, kissing the first two fingers of her right hand and throwing the kiss to the Goddess. That was the bargain she had struck last night when the rain was pouring down and it looked as if her ceremony might have to be postponed: if Xori would stop the rain, she would soar through the air like a seagull. She would thank the Goddess by jumping off one of the sea cliffs — not too high a cliff but one worthy of the jump. The jump would be a symbol of trust, a sign she knew the fair weather was a present, not something to be haggled over like trading beads.

  "And please make the water deep," she added, throwing Xori another kiss, for although she knew perfectly well that the tides arou
nd the village could vary a great deal, she hadn't taken that into account last night. She quickly inspected the sea again and was relieved to see that she was in luck. The tide was coming in, but how high would it get? Half a dozen hands of water could make a real difference when you were jumping from five times your own height. Well, there was no time left to stand around figuring it out. If the water level was dangerously low, she'd have to ask the Goddess for a postponement. Otherwise, she'd take what came.

  Commanding the dogs to stay behind, she ran down the beach. When she reached the overturned fishing boats, she skidded to a stop and looked at them longingly. The boats were dugout canoes, about fifteen hands long, their sides carved with scenes from the lives of Amonah and Xori. Marrah knew she could easily turn one over and drag it out into the surf, and even put up the mast and leather sail if the wind wasn't too strong, but although the idea of a swift ride down to the cliffs was tempting, she'd be in big trouble if her aunts and uncles discovered she'd taken a boat again without permission. She'd tried that on her thirteenth birthday, some five months ago, and for weeks afterward she had been forced to listen to tedious stories about children who had taken out boats, flipped over, and drowned. When she was a woman she could sail wherever she pleased, but even though her coming-of-age ceremony was going to take place this very morning, she was still a child. "I'll be back for you later," she promised the boats, and with one more longing glance, she broke into a run — and just in time too: she had hardly put the last of the dugouts behind her when she heard baby Seshi's hungry wail break the morning silence.