Celtika by Robert Holdstock Read Free Book Online

sedjas will guard me, but if I shut myself off and breathe smoke and beat the skin drums, out of sight of all these others, then what could I hope to understand of the world to the south?’
    Her spirited and forceful denial of tradition was not welcomed behind the high wall and heavy gates of her village, but was allowed, and the stinking skin lodge, with its potions, poisons, fungi, bark extracts, fish oils and eye-opening, if dizzying, fermentations remained closed, the flaps of the door pinned together by the narrow bones of some wading bird or other.
    The child skipped and laughed and teased through these last days of the long winter night, sniffing at me, questioning me, ignoring her uncle, Lemanku, who counselled against her overt curiosity; breaking all the rules; using her newly granted talents in charm to try to turn me inside out, unaware that after so many thousands of years on the Path I could hear every unspoken question in her mind (if I’d wanted to) and could keep her at a distance quite easily.
    It was not Niiv who represented the problem for me. It was overcoming mindless, ancient Enaaki in his lake. Older powers take more understanding. We grow too wise to comprehend the bleakness from the beginning of Time.
    ‘How are you going to do it?’ the harpy insisted yet again.
    ‘I’ve told you. I’m going to gouge a hole through the ice and swim down to the bottom of the lake.’
    ‘You’ll die at once. There are a thousand corpses in the water, all of them fools like you who thought they could simply smear grease on their bodies, dive in and find out the secrets of the lake. No, I’m sure you must have a trick. You have a special charm to protect you. A sedja. ’
    I spoke the truth when I told her, ‘No special charm at all. If what I hope is down there is down there—then I’ll be protected from below.’
    Well … possibly.
    I gathered up snow into a ball and threw it at her, striking her squarely on the nose, stopping her in her tracks. She was outraged. I apologised.
    ‘I thought you’d duck.’
    She shook her head furiously, snow crystals spraying. ‘I thought only children played like that with snow,’ she admonished.
    ‘Still a child at heart. Sorry.’
    ‘You’re not a child, you’re a madman,’ she went on. ‘And a liar. You must know so much more than you’re telling me.’
    If only that were true, I thought. I could smell her frosting breath. From below her clothes came the aroma of musk and I kept remembering her ancestor, Meerga, whose musky odour still haunted me. Her pale eyes were like jewels. Despite the cold I was aroused and charmed by this dancing bird in her blue, white and red-dyed furs.
    She knew I liked her. I could see the sparkle in the way she watched me. But she was so inquisitive, quite certain that I was in command of a hidden sorcery.
    ‘Very well. If you must know, I’ve eaten a whole reindeer antler, which I first carved with the Seven Cries and Chants that open the gates to the Frozen Deep, and under these new clothes my body is wrapped in fish guts and liver, so that Enaaki won’t smell the human inside.’
    ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she muttered irritably. ‘Enaaki will smell you at once. You’re making fun of me now.’
    I had no special skills in frozen lakes; it was a matter of small magic to survive drowning and the cold for an hour or so—enough time, I hoped, to make the contact with the deep. My problem was one of time—I had to get through the lid of ice before these brief glowing dawns became stronger, every instinct in me told me this. The ship only screamed in winter, never in summer. Bright dawn was very near and everything I needed to accomplish had to be accomplished before the sun melted the white whiskers of ice on the trees.
    ‘I wasn’t making fun of you.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. If you don’t prepare, you’ll drown. One more white-belly to be hooked out and fed back in pieces to Enaaki. Make a joke of it if you want,