Page 3 of The Winter Goddess
Before
I spent the next centuries in the quiet, still places of the world, and I saw little of humans, though I knew that Danu still fawned and cooed over them, her favorite playthings. I noticed them distantly sometimes: A startled face flashing under torchlight in the woods as I hunted a deer. A woman’s wide smile as she threw a ball of snow at her young son. The shadow of a boat passing over the lake I swam in.
They, in turn, rarely saw more of me than a flash of silver hair, green eyes, blue skin, and even when they did, they did not recognize me. They said I was a falling star near the horizon, a ripple of light on green leaves, the dancing colors that occasionally lit the dark sky. This was true in a way, because for them I was nothing more than a flicker, a moment—ephemeral and unknowable as the moon or the wind.
Danu had never reproached me for not returning to the mortals, but I knew that she still wished I would take the interest in them I once had. Each time I visited Tara, she told me of their latest exploits and inventions as if hoping to entice me back to them. She had bidden me to return to Tara for a festival she was putting on for them, as though such a thing would make me want to walk among them again. I had come, but not to please Danu. It had been some time since I’d visited my grove in the north woods, and lately I had longed to return there, to the place where my skin had become blue, where I’d first felt the true joy of winter.
Though I’d only been back at the palace for a single day I already felt caged, and so I paced the halls, walking in and out of the rooms until I saw Dagda in the courtyard. “What are you weaving?” I said, looking closely at the tapestry.
“The story of our beginning.” Dagda ran a hand along his forehead, a farcical gesture of weariness that he had never given up though he had been a god for centuries. “Danu hoped I would present it to the mortals.” He gestured to the tapestry.
In it, Danu was wandering, a god alone in a blue, cold world, meeting mortals here and there, but always too different, too odd for them to accept her. It showed her finally settling on the hill of Tara; building the white-walled palace, weaving pink sunsets and golden sunrises and silver moonlight into the walls; creating her beloved beehives, golden honey dripping from her hands. Dagda had managed to capture the despair on her face when she looked around at all she’d created and saw that she was still alone. The tapestry ended with her holding her hand out to a faceless mortal, light springing from her fingertips as she made him into one like her. Into a god. The weaving was beautiful—though, of course, it was not really the story of our beginning. It was the story of Danu. Of her, before she’d created us.
“But why are you weaving it?” I asked. “You don’t need to. You could just wave your hand and it would appear as you imagined it.”
“I like the work of it.” Dagda’s hands were busy as he shaded Danu’s curls so they seemed to glow.
“It’s a foolish impulse.” I frowned, irritated by the gods’ hypocrisy. They used mortal gestures and sang mortal songs, they spoke longingly of pain and heartache because they did not—or chose not to—remember the truth of mortality that I had seen as a child. They spoke of cream, warm and fresh from a cow, and did not remember how often it curdled and soured. They spoke of the sweetness of strawberries grown by their own hand and did not remember the sour disappointment of fruit rotted off the vine. They cooed over fat-bellied women and did not remember those same women’s grey death faces, their dead children’s blue lips.
Enya’s face, white and cold, came to my mind unbidden, and I flicked my head, shaking off the thought of the long-dead girl. Enya had only been young. When mortals grew, they became cruel, selfish, betraying each other as Cormac had, with deeds both large and small. I would not be pulled into their lives again.
“You are not mortal, and you never have been, Cailleach.” Dagda wiped away the flakes of snow that had swirled across his tapestry when I’d thought of Enya. “It pleases me to weave Danu’s story. That is enough for me. They will be awed when they see it, as they should be. I’ve always said Danu should tell the tale more often.”
Danu usually wore her mortal face among the humans, but as they approached us now, cresting the hill to Tara, she looked nothing like them. She stood taller than their tallest man, hair golden as the sun’s rays sweeping down her back all the way to her feet. Roses twined through her hair, climbing it like a trellis, and crowning her head with pink and white buds. Her eyes were green and soft and her entire being glowed golden as though she were the sun, walking among us.
“Welcome, mortals.” She swept a hand toward them, voice gentle as a summer breeze, and she smiled as if content, though I didn’t understand how she could be; the moment the humans set foot in the palace I began to choke on their scent. I hadn’t smelled it in so long, not since those days in Mooghaun with Danu and Enya. I remembered that I had grown used to it then, had soon stopped noticing, but now it seemed all I could smell was the sour-vinegar scent of their bodies. I wished I could escape, run to the woods once more, but I had promised Danu I would come and did not want to incite her anger, so I stood there stiffly, watching them. They looked so tired—even the children wore their mortality heavily. For all that they prayed to the gods, their lives still seemed full of hardship.
They stayed clustered together, perhaps a hundred of them, and even though they were much smaller than us, they seemed to clog the palace. A woman ran a hand through her hair and a strand floated to the pristine floor. An old man coughed, leaning a hand against the wall, and left behind a smudged handprint. A child wailed, and her voice bounced off the walls, echoing over and over. I seemed to be the only one who cared about these violations, so I did nothing, silently following Danu and the mortals into the courtyard. This was where we spent most of our time when we were all in Tara together and it looked like a clearing in a spring wood, filled with golden-barked birches, blue-green firs, rowans and alders. The ground was a mix of marble tiles interspersed with spongy moss, a spring bubbling up in the center. Tonight, the trees were hung with stars that twinkled softly—yellow, white, and blue. Danu had heaped the floor with cushions in a variety of bright and bewildering colors and laid out food on long tables. Children peeled bark from the birches, yanked flowers from their stalks, while their parents smashed the grass flat with their heavy steps, spilling wine carelessly into the spring.
I didn’t want to walk into the courtyard and have all their curious eyes on me, so I waited in the doorway until Danu finally left her crowd of admirers to scoop up a goblet of wine near me.
“Why have the festival here? Wouldn’t the throne room be more appropriate?”
Danu shrugged. “I did not want them to be so frightened by us that they would just stand there and babble. I want the gods and mortals to mingle as we once did.” Her voice was wistful, and my stomach twisted with guilt and anger. I knew she missed my hand in hers, missed laughing together over mortal gestures as we walked back to Tara, but I was not a child anymore. And I knew it was not me she truly yearned for but the entertainment and adoration I’d once provided—as the mortals did now. And though I did not want to be among them again, that did not mean that I wanted to laugh at them either. I just wanted to be far away from them again, away from both their noise and their fragility.
Danu must have read my thoughts, because her face creased. “I know you still mourn Enya, but it was so long ago. And you could meet someone new. Find joy from another mortal as you did from her.” She gestured at them, and I could tell she meant her words even as an old man scratched his nose and a child spat a gob of spit into the spring. Danu frowned. “They are more than their…habits. You could listen to their stories. Walk among them and learn how they live again.”
“I’ve seen how they live.” My voice was flat. “They hold nothing for me.”
That night, the other gods put on quite a show for the mortals. Dagda wove their likenesses into flowers and leaves and they exclaimed with wonder. Manannán doused the room in darkness, then made the spring leap and dance, catching the starlight in the droplets so it looked like we were standing among the stars.
Danu, of course, was everywhere; holding the children, laughing with the women, throwing dice with the men. Light trailed from her, and I saw the mortals’ eyes follow that golden ripple, marking where she had been, where she was going. She was the one they wanted to speak to, the one they wanted to tell their troubles to, and as the night wore on, she began performing miracles for them. She touched a woman’s stomach and it swelled with a child before our eyes. She laid her hand on a man with a broken arm and the limb straightened. She turned the water of the spring to wine and back, and with each miracle she performed, her power dimmed for a moment, the golden light falling away for less than a breath. I’d never seen Danu weaken in any way, and it was disconcerting, but I wasn’t sure that anyone else had noticed, not even the other gods who beamed when the mortals turned to them asking for more.
Dagda —they held their hands out in supplication— Dagda, will you bless my nets?
Morrígan, will you keep me safe and bloodless in battle?
Manannán, will you grant us bounty on the sea?
Lug, will you fill my purse with gold?
Finally, a woman with long black hair said my name. “Cailleach.” She reached out a hand, and unconsciously I reached back, as I had for Enya, but then my hand met hers and I could feel the fine lines of her fingertips, and of course she wasn’t Enya. She was just a mortal woman who was trying to ask, to take from me, take as Cormac had taken from Enya, as he had ripped my friend away from me , and I yanked my hand from hers and turned away, striding out of the palace before Danu could stop me. I should not have returned to Tara, not even to placate Danu. Mortals brought only hardship. I would have nothing more to do with them.
I walked north, away from Tara, determined to visit my clearing one last time before I left this part of the world for good.
The first thing I noticed was the smell. I was walking through a dark wood, and though there was pine and loam in the air, there was something else too; a sour dampness that I associated with mortals. I frowned and quickened my step, and soon, far too soon, the trees thinned, and I stepped out onto a huge expanse of clear land.
I stood, still as a statue, unable to fathom what I saw in front of me.
The whole section of the wood where my clearing had stood had been felled. Nothing remained but a smooth expanse of barren dirt rising to a mound. But it was not my mound. It was a mortal-made hill. I knew, because I could smell their hands on the smooth white stones and on the dirt and even in the air that I breathed. I choked on the overwhelming scent and fell to my knees, horror crawling up my throat.
The clearing was empty, but I could see the mortals in everything: in the tramped-grass path around the mound, in the marks on the stone where they had bit in with their sharp chisels and tools. They had taken what was mine and marked it as theirs. They had taken my clearing, the first place my skin had become blue, and they had broken it open to the sky so that my skin could not shift and twist to match the shafts of moonlight and shadow.
I numbly followed the tunnel they had made into the center of the mound. The tunnel twisted until it finally led me into a central chamber where I saw that they had further desecrated my clearing, turning it into a place of death. For in the central chamber were white bones heaped with the things mortals so longed for: golden torcs, and jeweled diadems and weapons, knives and swords and shining armor, ceramic bowls and the stone tools they had used to chip away at the stone—the tools they had used to bring down the once-mighty forest that had surrounded the mound. Tears filled my eyes as I looked at the desecration around me. They had taken my trees and my blue shadows, and they had broken the stones and churned up the earth, and for what? To fill a hole with pretty treasures for the dead?
I was suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of it, the decayed bones and strong iron and sour mortality, and I fled outside, climbing to the top of the mound. I fell to my knees and wept, remembering how I had once stood here, the earth firm and deep beneath my feet, watching my skin rim with blue and my arms gather snow before I knew about loss, before I knew of anything other than Danu and myself. And I wanted it back, I wanted it again, but I did not have Danu’s power; I could not stretch out my hand and make the trees return.
So I mourned, weeping even as glittering snowflakes began to fall upon me, covering me with a soft white mantle, making me part of the landscape, and I wished that I could lie there forever, until the world turned over once again, until the mortals who ruined so much, who took and took without thought, were dead and gone, until they were as white as the bones that lay beneath me.
I could still smell them.
I lay there and let the snow fall and fall until finally, slowly, it began to push away their rancid scent; the green hills became white and the landscape became soft and formless, and their bodies grew cold, so cold, and then they could no longer take, not from the trees and not from their daughters and not from me.
I do not know how long I lay there, whether hours or days or months passed as I held winter fast, grasped it tightly in my fist so that the snow kept piling, the winds kept howling.
Eventually, though, Danu came.
“Child,” she said, suddenly appearing before me. Though the snow still fell, it did not land on her. Danu reached out a hand and I let her pull me to my feet, expecting understanding. Succor, perhaps. Sorrow over what the mortals had done. Instead, she spoke sternly: “Daughter.” When I looked up her expression was grave.
“It is too cold.” Danu waved her arm and the mound we stood upon changed. Where a moment before there had been nothing but white, we now stood on the green hill the mortals had built. My body felt numb, as though I’d been turned to stone, and I glared at her, meeting her eyes, the only thing that marked us as kin—though hers were the spring green of new grass and mine were as dark as fir boughs. Suddenly I hated even that small similarity to her. If not for my mother’s eyes, I might be able to forget that I had ever belonged to anything other than myself. How could she choose them, love them , the mortals who had done this to me, who had torn down those very firs? I could smell them again and I thought of the white bones below me, thought of Enya’s white face, and gritted my teeth, and then we stood in a blizzard once more, the whirling snow and wind tearing away the memory and smell of death. I pulled my hand away and took a step back.
“They ruined it,” I rasped. My voice was pleading and hoarse from weeping. “They stole my clearing from me. The place where I became a god. Where you gave me winter.” But Danu, who had compassion for all mortals, for their toil and their burdens, their wars and weddings, looked on me without any.
“It is time for spring, Cailleach.” Her voice was firm. “This winter has gone on too long, has been too deep. They have died in their thousands already. If you do not let spring come, they will all be lost. Their crops will wither. Their children will breathe their last. More of their children,” she said, a tear running down her cheek.
“They die whether or not winter is long.” My hands curled into fists, trying to bar the spring warmth that I knew Danu wanted to spread across the world.
“There will be no one left. If this winter does not end, you will bury the world and there will only be us.”
Us. Only the gods. No noise and no stench.
No mortals.
“You’ve walked among them,” Danu said. “You know what they are like—”
“It has been centuries since I walked among mortals, Danu. I was a child, and even then, I saw nothing except avarice and jealousy and death.” I closed my eyes, even as other images flashed before me: Enya spinning in a circle of firelight, Sorcha’s warm hands braiding my hair, the gurgling chuckle of baby Cathal. I forced them aside.
Danu sighed, and I remembered the time we had spent weeks trying to perfect their sighs. I remembered watching Enya as her body had drawn tight, then collapsed under the weight of her breaths. I remembered too her last exhale, the moment her body had fallen and did not rise again.
“If you will not end the winter yourself, then something must be done.” She said the words slowly, and then she was towering over me, no longer in her mortal skin, but wearing the god form I so rarely saw, a grim determination in her eyes. Leaves spun around her head and the air crackled with the force of the light, as though the whole world was moments away from bursting into flame. “You will return to Tara.” Her voice was set. “You will stand before the gods and answer for what you have done.”
I had not willingly entered the throne room in centuries, but it had not changed in all that time: it was still absurdly large, with vaulted ceilings that made every footstep and voice echo as though it held a hundred of us rather than six. Its walls were made of something pink and iridescent that might have been shell and might have been flower petals and the large, narrow pool that ran down the center of the room mirrored everything in a way that was dizzying and unpleasant.
The thrones were the same too, vines twisted together into large chairs. Danu had created them, had said that she wanted them the same, as none of us was above any other god, but this was all pretense. Danu was the ultimate authority. The other gods felt they owed her everything. They gave her loyalty, devotion, love. All of them except me.
“Cailleach.” Danu’s voice had softened back to its usual timbre. She had changed her face, too, back to the mortal one she was so fond of. She’d told me once that she wore it to remind herself of what she had once been like, of what she had lost. “We have called you here to answer for what you have done.”
“I have sent the snow. The cold. As I have ever done.”
“You have buried them.” Danu’s voice was sad. “They have died. They are dying.”
“I told you, Danu, it is the only way.”
“The only way for what ?” Morrígan leaned forward in her throne.
“The only to make them stop taking.” My voice was quiet.
They were silent for a moment, and I wondered if they were thinking of their own mortal lives. Were they remembering that hunger of mortality, the need to consume?
“And who are you, to decide what is theirs to take or not?” Danu’s voice was fierce. “We are their guardians. Their guides and friends. We do not kill them.”
I laughed. “Morrígan kills them all the time, in the wars she’s always fighting. She’s regaled us often with stories of the men she’s run through with her spear, told us about spilling their entrails onto the ground.”
Morrígan shook her head, the light catching on her dark skin, on her gold-brown halo of curls. “It is not the same. I don’t fight in my god form but as one of them, and only when they call. It is for mortals, and by their hand, that I kill.”
“Another way we are different. All of you have a god form and a mortal form. You have two faces. I do not. I have never been anything but my true self. Perhaps this is why I can see the truth, and you cannot.”
“So many have died, Cailleach.” Dagda echoed Danu, his face was creased with sorrow.
“They all die eventually. What does it matter, whether they die now or in twenty years or a hundred?”
Danu looked sad. “Once you did not believe such a thing. Once you grieved over them.”
I looked away from her. “I was young.” My voice was hard as stone. “I understand what mortals are now.” It would have been better, in the end, if I had never met Enya. Then I never would have known what it was to love a mortal. I would never have known the grief of death.
“Perhaps you are right.” Danu’s fingers drummed against her throne. “All of us know what it costs to kill a mortal because we once were mortals.” Danu’s face was set. “It is time for you to walk among them again.”
At her words, a shiver of fear ran down my back and I thought of that moment from my youth, Danu’s face hot and bright, melting the snow into rivulets of water.
Danu stood, and the light of her filled the room as it had filled the clearing that day. “You will be given a mortal form. You will live among them until you understand what it is to be a mortal. Why they act as they do. You will live and you will die until you understand. This is the punishment I place upon you. Do any think my judgement unjust?” She barely glanced at the other gods. She knew, as I did, that none of them would speak against her. I looked at Dagda and saw that his face was creased in sadness, but all he did was shake his head at me gently before dropping his gaze.
Danu raised her hand, and in an instant the cold that had filled my body since she had given me winter fled. The ice that ran through my veins evaporated, the frost that knit my bones together melted away, and my blue skin turned pale and white as though I were dead.
As though I were mortal.