Spear

Burak

In the wild waste, a girl, growing. A girl at home in the wild, in the leafless

thicket of thin grey saplings with moss growing green on one side. In this

thicket, the moss side does not face north but curves in a circle with its back

to the world, and, at its centre, where the branches grow most tangled and

forbidding, is a hill. In the face of that hill, always hidden from the world, is

the dark mouth of the cave where the girl lives with her mother.

As far as the girl can tell, none on two legs but herself and her mother

has ever trod here. Her mother will creep from the cave only as far as the

gardens at the edge of the thicket, and then only in summer when the leaves

are cloak enough to hide the sun-burnished bronze of her heavy-waved hair,

when the hard enamel blue of her eyes might be forget-me-nots; but the girl

is at home in all the wild. She roams the whole of Ystrad Tywi, the valley of

the Tywi who fled Dyfed in the Long Ago. In this valley, where there is a

tree she will climb it; it will shelter her, and the birds that nest there in

spring will sing to her, warning of any two-legged approach. In May, as the

tree blossoms fall and herbs in the understorey flower, she will know by the

scent of each how it might taste with what meat, whether it might heal, who

it could kill. From its nectar she will know which moths will come to drink,

know too of the bats that catch the moths, and what nooks they return to

where they hang wrapped in their leather shrouds as the summer sun climbs

high, high enough to shine even into the centre of the thicket. Before

harvest, when the bee hum spreads drowsy and heavy as honey, she tastes in

their busy drone a tale of the stream over which they skim, the falls down

which the stream pours, the banks it winds past where reeds grow thick and

the autumn bittern booms. And when the snow begins to fall once again,

she catches a flake on her tongue and feels, lapping against her belly, the

lake it was drawn from by summer sun, far away—a lake like a promise she

will one day know. Then as the world folds down for winter, so too do the

girl and her mother, listening to the crackle of flame and, beyond the leather door curtain, the soft hiss of snow settling over the hills and hollows like

IN THE CAVE is a great hanging bowl. “My cup,” her mother calls it, when

she tells her stories. On warm days, bright precious days when her mother

will venture outside under the sun—beckon a bird to her finger and sing

with it its song—the cup is a gift to the laughing, blue-eyed Elen from her

lover, the girl’s father with grey-green eyes like the sea. On these days, her

mother calls the girl Dawnged: her blessing, her gift and favour. The girl

likes this name, and these days when the bowl is just a bowl, and they work

together in the garden while her mother tells tales of the Tuath Dé, the sidhe

gods who came to Eiru-over-the sea with four great treasures, one each

from the four islands of the Overland that drowned. The Tuath are forever

“There is the Dagda, with his midnight steed. His treasure was the

greatest of all, the golden cup—No, not so deep with the beans, Dawnged.”

And the girl would push the next bean less far down into its long, heaped

line of dirt. “Now, this cup— Do you remember the cup, little gift?”

And the girl would say, “Yes!” and tell of how the Morrigan, whose

steed was grey, had stolen it from the Dagda for herself, and how her lover,

Manandán, son of the sea and raiser of mists, had stolen it from her in turn.

And she would ask, “What else is the Morrigan called?” Or, “What other

name has the Dagda?” But her mother would just hug her, tell her never to

steal, for stealing wore away one’s soul, then laugh and ruffle her hair and

kiss her eyes—“So like them both”—and they would promise each other

they would stay together in the cave, always.

On these fine days when her mother was herself, the girl heard tales, too,

of Lugh of the shining spear, and Elatha, keeper of the stone. She heard of

Núada the king, who held the sword of light—until Bres, Elatha’s son, took

it, and Núada must be content with a silver arm. And Bres, Núada, and

But the stories changed with the weather. On dark autumn days, when

the wind moaned and stripped the last forlorn leaves from the trees, when it

fretted and worried at their peace, thrusting its tongue deep into their warmcave—trying to lick them out as the girl had seen a badger lick out ants

from a tree—on those days her mother grew gaunt and strange. The child

would wake in the night to her mother’s dream cries—a man coming to

steal her, steal her child, steal her payment—and her mother would not eat,

only hunch over the bowl and scry, and follow the girl about with haunted

eyes. She would shout at the girl and rant, confusing her, confusing the

tales, for now Elen herself was in them. In these tales the cup was not a gift;

it was thrice-stolen, it was payment. In these tales Manandán was a cruel

trickster who came with his cup to Dyfed, following the raiding men of

Eiru, and found Elen, Elen whose magics were fragile and human against

the might of the Tuath Dé, and there he took her by force and kept her

prisoner, his willing—no, not willing, compelled to be willing—slave, until

the day she fled, taking the golden cup as payment. She fled, and hid herself

inside the cave of stolen trophies: the cup she stole from its first thief;

herself who was stolen, and stole herself back; and the gift she stole that he

On these days, Elen calls the girl Tâl, her payment. “Because I am owed,

Tâl, I am owed. He owes me, yes, for possessing my soul and my mind; and

the other owes me, too, because he knew. Oh, he knew what Manandán

would do. But they will never find us, no. We will stay hidden, we will stay

safe, and they will never know your true name.”

She will never say what the girl’s true name is, or who the other was, and

the stories are never the same. And always the cave is hidden.

THE BOWL IS not gold, it is not silver, nor even beaten bronze; it is enamel

on black iron that never dulls and never dents, though sometimes the iron

shimmers with light reflected from elsewhere. Even direct from the hearth it

will not burn the hand that holds it, and any who drink from it are healed.

Or so Elen tells the girl. The girl herself cannot tell because she drinks and

eats from the bowl every day, but every day she grows tall and taller, strong

and stronger; her hair with the same heavy wave as her mother’s but paler,

brass where her mother’s is bronze, her eyes sea grey with a hint of green.

With her fingers she traces the bowl’s wondrous twining beasts of inlaid cave—trying to lick them out as the girl had seen a badger lick out ants

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