One of my books, Beltaine's Song, is filled with spring themes, including battles fought between the Irish and the Picts in the sixth century of what is now called Scotland. There were women warriors among the fighters. My heroine was one of them. What puts the warrior in the heart of a woman? This is one of the themes I explored in this trilogy.
Among the beauty of spring, there was the ugliness of death.
Excerpt from Beltaine's Song:
The armies
clashed below on the peninsula, staining the green earth with bright red blood.
Heartrending screams from the dying broke the calm, silencing the seabirds with
fear. War is ugly. Is the Christian Hell like this?
Surrounded on
all sides by the churlish sea, islands emerged from the mist, brooding in the
distance, witnesses to the horrible bloodshed. Fresh sea air swallowed some of
the detestable smells of battle, filling her lungs with the scent of briny air,
but the faint scent of blood set her pulse racing. With a heavy heart, she
thought this battle particularly ugly because blood fought against blood,
dividing the clans.
Domelch sensed
something foul in the air around Dunadd, treachery lurking in the darkest
corners. She thought back to the day she saw her brother riding hard to
Dunadd—from the south. She knew Aedan sensed the foulness of treachery for the
archers' positioning had been kept secret from all the commanders. If he
suspected Galan, he had kept that to himself.
Gathering her
archers, they positioned themselves in the hill's crevices, waiting for Aedan's
army to lure the enemy their way and give Domelch the signal from the battle
horn.
Crouched in a
painful position between two rocks, Domelch nocked her arrow and waited. “Fire
at my signal,” she ordered her archers.
Quiet, the
archers became one with the craggy hill dressed in gray and green tunics,
blending into the gray moss-covered hills. The cold, damp stones pressed
painfully into Domelch's sides. Keeping her muscles still, she ignored the
pain, her mind focused on the battle array below.
Clashing spears
and swords against war shields splintered the air, drowning out the sea tides.
War cries and yelps of pain mingled with horses' neighs and bursts from battle
horns. She waited for the three short bursts of the battle horn, her heart
racing with each passing moment as the battle neared their position.
Three short
blasts from the ox-horn echoed through the hills, a fearsome sound like the
trumpets of the Underworld calling home the dead. Domelch shuddered at the
thought. We will send the dead home, she thought. “Loose your arrows,”
she commanded, gathering her courage and battle fury.
Kelley Heckart
Otherworldly tales steeped in myth &
magic.
All three books of my Dark Goddess trilogy are
available in Print and Ebook. Set in Dark Age Scotland, I mixed history with a
Samhain/Beltaine myth that revolves around an Irish clan and the goddesses
Brigit and Cailleach.
