WHEN WOMEN WERE WARRIORS
BOOK I
THE WARRIOR’S PATH
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EPPIE Award Winner!
Winner of the 2010 EPIC Ebook Award for fiction in the Mainstream category.
What others are saying about When Women Were Warriors:
“5 stars: Breathtakingly gorgeous writing by an author who has woven a multi-layered tale of such depth, breadth and insight that it was very nearly a spiritual experience...and yet, an incredibly thrilling, sensuous and complex adventure... Both men and women of all persuasions seem to love these books, and when you read them, you'll understand how that can happen. Very rare. Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!”
—from a review by T. T. Thomas, September 1, 2011
“4 stars: There are some books that weave a magic spell around us, that take us by the hand and lead us to a place that feels like home for as long as we spend amongst their pages. This is one of those books… A multi-layered story, The Warrior’s Path is for the most part deftly told, and reminiscent of old myths and folktales, giving it a feeling of timelessness and extraordinary beauty…It is a tale of womanhood, nurturance, respect, and above all, love…”
—from a review by Kate Genet on the website, Kissed By Venus
“5 stars: This is one of the most unexpected books I have ever read. It surprised and delighted me. It’s an epic tale of deceit, betrayal, warfare, quest, and everything you have grown to expect out of an epic. It compares to the Iliad or Beowulf. The plot is amazing and there is a tender love story cradled within it like a shy subplot peeping out from behind the hero.”
—from a review by gordon clason, January 25, 2011
“5 stars: Beautifully Written, Wonderful Story, a Joy to Read:
Simply put, these books are literature…you’ll not be able to put the books down, but when you’re done, you’ll recall passages that moved you for a long time to come.”
—from a review by Liz Bradbury, author of Angel Food and Devil Dogs
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Also by Catherine M. Wilson:
When Women Were Warriors
Book II
A Journey of the Heart
&
When Women Were Warriors
Book III
A Hero’s Tale
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WHEN WOMEN WERE WARRIORS
BOOK I
THE WARRIOR’S PATH
by
Catherine M. Wilson
~~~~~~~~~
Published by Shield Maiden Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2008 by Catherine M. Wilson
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
All characters depicted herein are the product of the author’s imagination and do not represent any actual persons, living or dead.
This book is available in print from most online retailers.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this ebook at the introductory price of 99 cents. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.
If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to purchase Book II and Book III of this trilogy. They are available for $9.99 each, and the author would appreciate your not sharing them with friends, although you are welcome to share Book I. If you enjoyed Book I, please show your appreciation of the author’s work by purchasing the rest of the trilogy.
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For my mother
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Acknowledgements:
Many people offered advice, support, and encouragement during the “quite some time” it took to finish this project.
It is an extraordinary piece of luck for a writer to find someone who is willing to discuss a work in progress, someone who can enter the world of the story and gossip about the characters as if they were real people, who will question their motivations, scrutinize their actions, complain when they step out of character, and cast a light on a side of them their creator may have missed—someone who will take the work as seriously as the author does. For me that person is my friend and editor, Donna Trifilo, who, in addition to all of the above, pushed me through the hard times.
To everyone who was willing to read a work in progress, sometimes more than once, I offer my gratitude and the assurance that everything they had to say about it mattered.
Susan Strouse helped me overcome a major stumbling block at a crucial turning point. Lisa Liel, whose enthusiasm for the story rekindled my own enthusiasm, showed me how I could take a good idea and make it better. Ann Thryft’s considerable knowledge of the time, place, and culture deepened my own understanding of the story and its characters. Jo Trifilo’s insightful comments and careful critique gave me a new perspective on the story.
In ways too numerous to mention, significant contributions were also made by Jen Davis-Kay, Katherine Gilmartin, Rebecca Hall, Rob Field, Carmen Carter, Kate Maynard, the late Dr. Susan Barnes, Judi Miller, Jack Contento, Ru Emerson, the members of my first writers’ group—Morgan Van Dyke, Barbara Murray, Cooper Gallegos, Sandralee Watters, Marlene Michaelson, Rebecca Morn, and Eileen Thompson—who suffered through my early attempts to get my story started, and Heather Rose Jones, who helped me find my characters’ names.
And many thanks to George Derby and Marissa Holm for keeping me well fed.
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CONTENTS
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1 MERIN’S HOUSE
All the women of my family had gone to war. My mother’s sisters, older than she, fought in the service of the Lady Abicel in the last war against the northern tribes. Their mother served the Lady’s mother in wars told of in grandmothers’ tales. As far back as our line was remembered, our family and hers stood side by side.
My mother too had served the Lady. Too young to bear arms in the last war, from within the palisade where she trained to take her place among the warriors, she heard the clash of arms and the screams of the dying outside the walls. She witnessed her three sisters carried lifeless from the battlefield, leaving her, the youngest, to be her mother’s heir. By the time she became a warrior, the tribes had made an uneasy peace, a peace that so far remained unbroken.
Now my turn had come. In early springtime, when I was just sixteen, my mother took me to the house where she had won her shield so many years before. The Lady Abicel, long dead, had left her house and lands, along with her authority, to her only daughter, Merin. More than ties of custom, the closest ties of friendship bound my mother and the Lady Merin. Together they trained in the use of arms. Together they were made warriors. They remained shield friends, though my mother took a husband and returned to her mother’s house. As my mother had been bound to the service of the Lady Abicel, so would I be bound to the Lady Merin’s service.
On the day I left home, before I set foot across the threshold, my mother made me a present of new shoes. She put on her oldest pair, her journey shoes that had been from home and back again so many times they knew the way. I had meant to be mindful of my first step out the door, but when I turned to leave my little sister with some words of wise advice, I tripped over the stone doorstop and stumbled out into the bright day.
“Dazzle the eye of trouble,” said my mother, to turn bad luck aside.
From the place where our footpath joined the road we took a last look back. My mother waved and blew a farewell kiss to my sister standing in the doorway. I waved too, though my thoughts were flying far ahead of me down the road to Merin’s house.
The first day of our journey took us through country I knew well. My feet had worn smooth every footpath through the pastures where we grazed our sheep. By midmorning of the second day we had left the world I knew behind. We walked through gentler hills than ours, through meadows bright with new grass where red cattle grazed. We never went hungry or lacked a place to spend the night. As we had cared for travelers who came to our door, so our neighbors cared for us. Every evening we sat by the hearth fire of a stranger. Even after so many years, their faces sometimes come to me in dreams.
On the fifth day, at midmorning, we crested the last hill, and the valley that is the heart of Merin’s land lay before us. The river that watered it appeared so tranquil from a distance that I suspected my mother of exaggeration when she warned me of its treachery, of whirlpools and swift currents that would sweep the feet out from under the unwary. Flowing from north to south, it meandered past fields still winter-brown but shimmering with the green promise of a new year. While the part of me that was still a child already missed my home, the person I would become drew me into this new place.
I had heard so many stories of my mother’s life here that I felt as if I too were returning to this land, though I beheld it for the first time. For a long while we stood silent, gazing down upon it from the hillside. I wondered what my mother must be feeling. Some of the happiest years of her life had been spent here, and some of her dearest friendships had been made here, but she had also lost so much here that it must have been hard for her to see this place again.
My mother took my hand and drew me down beside her in the grass. A thousand times I’d heard the story, but I listened with new ears as she retold it.
In ancient days, when only women were warriors, lived a queen whose lands were rich and whose people were content, and all under her protection lived in peace. One dark day, the queen’s daughter, a young woman skilled in the hunt, rode out with her companions. All day they rode, past the time they should have turned for home, but they found no game, and the queen’s daughter would not turn back. At last they saw a red deer at the edge of a wood, and they loosed their hounds to run it down. The queen’s daughter, her hunting spear in hand, rode after it as it vanished among the trees.
The wood belonged to a tribe with whom the queen had once been at war, although many years had passed since there had been strife between them. On that dark day, the son of the queen whose forest it was also hunted there. He saw the red deer bound from between the trees and sent his spear after it. The deer leaped aside, and the spear struck the woman who pursued it.
Late that night her companions brought her body home, tied across her horse’s back where they should have tied the body of the deer. For nine days the queen gave herself to grief. Then she prepared to ride against her neighbors, to take the blood that her daughter’s blood demanded.
On the morning of the tenth day, the queen armed herself and called together the warriors of her household. As they made ready to set out, a young woman rode alone into their midst. At first they thought she was one of their clan, come to ride with her queen, but no one knew her, and she bore no arms. She dismounted and approached the queen. She knelt, as one of the queen’s own warriors would do. When she arose, she lifted her cloak from around her shoulders, and by her clothing all could see that she was of the tribe that had taken the life of the queen’s daughter. Her golden necklace marked her as the daughter of the queen against whom they prepared to ride.
As swords were drawn all around her, the girl stood still, never taking her eyes from the queen. “I have come to replace the one you lost,” she said. “My mother sends me with this message: If your child’s blood demands it, take the blood of this child of mine, but if you need a queen’s daughter to succeed you, take my daughter for your own.”
The queen drew her sword and set its point against the girl’s breastbone and in her eyes saw her fear and her courage. Seldom it happens that wisdom will conquer anger or that grief will yield to compassion, but that day the queen’s heart was satisfied. To spare another mother the grief she knew herself, the queen put away her sword and took the daughter of her enemy to be her own, and both tribes lived in safety and in peace forever after.
So it is the custom that a free woman leave her mother’s house to bind herself and those of her blood to a neighboring clan, either by the sword or by the cradle.
* * *
When I was a child, my mother told me countless stories of the time she’d spent here. Not about the war. That was the one thing she wouldn’t speak about unasked, and when I did find the courage to question her about it, her face grew so grim and her tone so solemn that I regretted asking. The tales she told were happy ones, of feasts and festivals, of youthful pranks and bold adventures.
The land was just as she’d described it, a patchwork of rich fields beside the river and pasture on the hillsides. The farmers’ cottages nestled protected between the hills, and trickles of smoke from their hearth fires sifted up through the thatch.
A mist hid the land across the river. It was rocky land, my mother said, no good for farming. On our side of the river, trees grew along the riverbank. Here and there on the open hillsides stood the sacred groves, each a temple to one or another of the powers of life and death.
My mother pointed to a group of timber buildings, surrounded by a maze of earthworks, atop a hill close by the river.
“There is your new home,” she said.
All that day we walked, down the hill, then north along a footpath that followed the river’s edge. From time to time we stopped to rest in the shade of trees just coming into leaf. We met no other travelers, only farmers working in their fields or children driving animals to pasture. The sun was setting as we climbed the hill to Merin’s house.
From the hillside where we sat that morning, the earthworks had appeared to be mere wrinkles in the earth. Now the embankments loomed high above our heads. Topped by a palisade, whose jagged silhouette against the reddening sky looked like a giant’s teeth, they formed a maze all around the hilltop. My mother bore no arms, and we passed unchallenged through the maze. The few people we met greeted us, but no one recognized my mother, and she saw no one she knew.
Inside the fortress a stone walkway took us past pens where goats were kept for their milk and piglets fattened on the household’s refuse. Then we made our way through a scattering of sheds. In one I caught a glimpse of a great loom. Another was a pottery, and another housed a forge.
Merin’s house stood on the hill’s crest. It was the largest house I’d ever seen. The timber walls towered over us, many times higher than the walls of the stone cottage I grew up in. The massive door of hewn planks stood open. In the great hall the household had gathered for the evening meal. Trestle tables had been set out, and women and men, more than I could count, filled the benches.
At the far end of the hall, a fire burned upon an open hearth. Weapons of all kinds covered the wall behind it. Swords and axes hung there, and spears of the kind used in war, but it was the shields that drew my eye, each one painted with the device of the warrior who had borne it.
Before the hearth the high table stood. At its head the Lady Merin presided over the assembled company. She was as dark as my mother was fair and almost as beautiful. Across her pale blue gown she wore a sash of indigo, a baldric for her sword. When she saw us standing in the doorway, she rose and beckoned to us. My mother took my hand, and we approached her.
The Lady gazed at my mother for a moment, then turned to me. She drew her sword and set its point against my breastbone. I knew my part. I set my fear aside and met her eyes. Her eyes held mine, but it was not my eyes she saw. What her gaze rested on, only she could see. I thought I heard the din of battle, but how could I have known what that sound was when I had never before heard it. The smoke of burning homes and fields drifted before my eyes, and the smell of burning reached me on a sudden breeze.
The Lady put her sword away and smiled at me. The smoke vanished, and with it the smell of burning, and the only sound I heard was the voices of the people in the hall.
A servant led me to a seat at another table, where I joined a group of girls my own age. They talked and laughed together, and bit by bit they drew me into their conversation. I learned that they were the companions. Each girl served one of the warriors. Many were apprenticed to their warriors and would become warriors themselves someday.
“You won’t be apprenticed,” one girl told me. “You’re too small.”
“My mother is a warrior,” I replied, “and she’s no bigger than I am.”
“Has she fought in battle?” the girl asked me.
I had to admit that she had not.
For a while I had been aware that I was being watched by the girl who sat across the table from me. She was long-boned and thin, and she would have been pretty if her expression were not so wary. She had not yet spoken to me. I caught her eye.
“I am Tamras, daughter of Tamnet,” I told her. “Who are you?”
“Sparrow,” she said, and turned to talk to the girl sitting next to her.
From time to time I glanced back at my mother, who sat beside the Lady. She would spend the evening with her friend, and in the morning she would leave for home. It might be years before I saw her again.
* * *
My first night in Merin’s house I found it hard to sleep. The other girls treated me with kindness. They found me some bedding and made a place for me in their sleeping loft, but I still felt like a stranger. There were more people here than I had ever seen together at once. How would I be able to remember them all?
Everything about the place felt strange to me. Nights at home were quiet. Here there was a constant noise of people—moving, talking, coughing, sleeping. Cracking and creaking noises startled me, and the other girls laughed at me a little. They told me it was the timbers of the house settling against each other. Stone houses make no sound.
Even the smells were unfamiliar. The heavy smell of roasting meat hung in the air. We seldom roasted meat at home. In Merin’s house they set quarters of beef over open fires, and the fat fell uncollected into the flames.
Other smells tumbled together—wood smoke and the sap that oozed from the timbers, the dusty straw strewn upon the floors downstairs, the animals in the pens outside, and other things I didn’t recognize.
I tried to remember how I had felt at home when I was looking forward to seeing someplace new. Everything there was so familiar that I longed for something different. Now I longed for just one familiar thing. I felt like a bird, caged all its life, set free by an open window and cowering upon the windowsill.
2 COMPANION
In the morning the Lady Merin sent a servant to bring me to her private chamber. Then I learned that what I had been told the night before was true. I would not be trained in the use of arms. Instead the Lady made me the companion of a warrior, a woman who had been in the household only a short time.
Though I tried to hide my disappointment, the Lady understood what I was feeling. I was the first daughter of my house. The blood of warriors ran in my veins, and a warrior’s place was my inheritance.
“For the time being,” the Lady told me, “you can serve me best by doing what I ask. You have the right to refuse, but I hope you will stay with us. Your mother handled weapons well despite her size. One day you may be strong enough to inherit her sword.”
So she didn’t take my hope away from me, and I stayed with her.
* * *
The companions’ loft was just a platform over the end of the great hall farthest from the hearth. It had no walls, only a railing to keep us from toppling over the side. The warriors slept upstairs, above the kitchen, each in her own tiny room partitioned off from the others by flimsy walls of wattle.
One of the companions showed me to my warrior’s room. She rapped on the doorpost, and before we heard an answer, she gave me a furtive look, then turned and fled back down the stairs. When there was still no answer to her knock, I pulled aside the curtain covering the doorway and went in.
My warrior was sitting cross-legged on her bed, the only piece of furniture in the room except for a small chest beside it. The morning light streamed in through the window and fell across her hands as she mended an old pair of boots. She looked up at me.
“I’m your companion,” I said.
“I don’t want a companion,” she replied.
She glared at me with dark and angry eyes until I couldn’t meet them anymore. When I looked away, she resumed her mending and paid me no more attention. I felt like running out the door, but my feet refused to move. I stood silent before her as if turned to stone.
After a little while my curiosity overcame my fear. There was something odd about her. I couldn’t think what it was. I’d had only one brief glimpse of her. Now the dark hair that tumbled loose over her shoulders fell forward and hid her face as she looked down at her work. Her dark eyes were all I could remember.
There was nothing unusual about her clothing. She wore a linen shirt the color of walnuts. Her trousers, like my own, were made of wool and dyed a darker brown. Her leather armor hung from a peg beside her bed, along with a sword in its scabbard and a shield, which bore no device.
She didn’t speak again. When the boots were mended, she put them on. Then she took her armor from the peg, slipped it on, and buckled it. By the time it occurred to me to help her, it was too late. She pushed past me and was out the door so quickly that I had to run to catch her as she went down the stairs and through the great hall.
Once outdoors she turned to face me. Though her eyes were no longer angry, they warned me not to follow her. She turned and strode away. I followed her anyway, but at a cautious distance, as she crossed the yard and threaded her way through the maze of earthworks. Outside the palisade I stopped and watched her walk down the hill, until she disappeared behind a stand of trees.
* * *
By the time my first day in Merin’s house was over, I was glad to see the end of it. The other girls told me that I would soon get used to life here, that the first few days are always hard, but I feared it might be many days before I felt at home.
Most of the companions came from households as large as this one. Just a few grew up in tiny villages like mine. As I listened to the talk in the companions’ loft that evening, I began to understand how different this place was from the only other place I knew. Villages in the hill country have little to tempt thieves. Here there were raids against the farms, grain and cattle stolen, border skirmishes.
I had heard tales of war all my life, but I didn’t realize that, even in a time of peace, there would be so much fighting. The warriors proved their value constantly. Without them, all that the land yielded would be taken from us. Without them, other tribes would take the land itself.
Aside from the servants, everyone living in Merin’s house was either a warrior or the companion of a warrior. The Lady kept the old traditions. Only women lived in this house. The men lived in a smaller house close by. They took their meals here and had the freedom of the great hall, but the rest of the house was forbidden to them.
The old women lived here too. They had been warriors once. Now, as members of the council, they served the Lady with wisdom instead of weapons.
I was afraid to tell the other companions that my warrior had refused me, but they already knew. They had expected it. They said I should just go about my work and pay her no attention. How could anyone pay her no attention?
* * *
Early the next morning I went to my warrior’s room only to find her gone, so I did as the companions had suggested and looked around for things to do. I swept the floor and aired the bedding. I emptied the slop jar. I filled the lamp with oil and trimmed the wick. I found some dirty clothing, a few worn woolen shirts and a pair of woolen trousers, and took them downstairs to wash them. Late that afternoon, when I returned them to my warrior clean and dry, she accepted them without a word.
There was nothing else to do, so I returned to my place in the companions’ loft. My heart was sore, and I had hoped to be alone there for a while, but I found Sparrow waiting for me. A year older than I, she was well-grown and strong enough to be apprenticed to her warrior. My face told her I was unhappy.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked me.
“I will be the first of my family without a shield,” I said, “and my warrior has no need of me. If there’s no place for me here, I might as well go home. At least I can be of some use to my family.”
Sparrow frowned her disapproval. “Are you so easily discouraged?”
I understood her, and I was ashamed.
“Don’t judge me by a handful of words,” I said.
In time I came to realize that Sparrow meant well. Sometimes she said hurtful things, but when the sting was gone, I saw that she was teaching me how to conduct myself in Merin’s house. So as not to shame my family, I hid my disappointment and my loneliness and lived each day as it came. My grandmother used to tell me that was how to get through hard times.
3 A HEALING
My warrior’s name was Maara, a name I had never heard before. No one in Merin’s house knew anything of her family or where she’d come from. No one I asked had spoken with her beyond what was necessary for daily life. The few who had tried to befriend her she’d rebuffed, and now they had little good to say of her.
Every day I did my best at whatever work I could find to do, while my warrior did her best to stay away from me. She hardly spoke to me, and when she did, it was either to send me away or to find fault with me for something. None of the other companions would put up with her. They assured me that when I had mastered the duties of a companion I could choose someone else.
While I was grateful to them for telling me I was not at fault, I was young enough to believe that I might succeed with my warrior where they had not. It was hard to bear her treatment of me when I was still so lonely in that house, but I was determined not to fail at the only thing the Lady had asked of me.
* * *
As they did every year in springtime, cattle raiders came out of the north, and our warriors left Merin’s house to guard our borders against them. The other warriors took their companions, but Maara made me stay behind. With her away there was even less for me to do.
I wasn’t idle long. A few days later they were back again. They had caught a band of cattle raiders in the act of butchering a calf and engaged them in a skirmish. One of them had hurt my warrior badly. His blade glanced off her shield and bit deep into her thigh. When she fell, he tried to finish her, and the force of his blow on her shield broke the bones of her forearm.
It was evening when her comrades brought her home. In the fading light the litter on which they bore her was black with blood. I helped the tired warriors carry her upstairs. When we set the litter down beside her bed, my hands were sticky, red in the lamplight.
My warrior lay unmoving, her eyes closed. She looked as if she might already be embarking on her journey to another world. We were about to put her on the bed when the healer came in to tend her.
“Let her bleed there on the floor,” she said. So we left her there.
My mother was a healer. She had taught me the use of herbs, and I often accompanied her when she was called to tend someone. I had helped her set broken bones and stitch up cuts made by the slip of an ax or knife, but I had never seen a wound like this one. It gaped open and bled until I wondered how my warrior could have any blood left in her.
I helped the healer remove her armor and her clothing. Together we set her broken arm. Then I watched as the healer cleaned and closed her dreadful wound. When the healer had done all she could, we washed the blood from my warrior’s body and put her into bed.
“I fear our work has been for nothing,” the healer told me. “I’ll brew something for her pain. Give it to her if she wakes tonight.”
In a little while a kitchen servant brought a bowl of tea. I took a sip of it. Bitter hops masked the strong taste of valerian root. It was a potent sleeping drug that would let my warrior sleep away her pain. It would let her sleep away her life. I poured it out into the slop jar.
I had no reason to care about the woman who thought she had no need of me. Her refusal of me had stung my pride. Perhaps I saw my chance to prove my value to her or to put her in my debt. I wish I could say I nursed her out of kindness, but it wasn’t true.
I waited until I thought everyone had gone to bed. Then I went down to the kitchen. The fragrance of lemon grass, just brought in to dry, led me to a little room behind the ovens. There I found what I was seeking. Herbs hung in bunches from drying racks. Shelves of pots, each containing a dried herb properly prepared, lined the walls. I soon found the ones I wanted — shepherd’s purse to stop her bleeding, sage and bloodwort to restore her blood.
I put them into the bowl in which the healer had brewed her tea. In the embers of the cooking fire was a cauldron of water hot enough to steep the herbs. I found a ladle and filled the bowl.
I returned to my warrior’s room. After the tea had cooled a bit, I dipped a clean cloth into it and put it to her lips. The tea trickled into her mouth and down her throat. When I saw her swallow, I knew it was safe to give her more.
All night I sat beside her on the bed. Several times she woke, and I encouraged her to drink more of the tea. I doubt she was aware of me, but she was thirsty, and she drank. Before the night was over, the bowl was empty.
At dawn I went to the window and took the shutter down. For the first time since they brought her home, I saw her clearly. Her pallor frightened me. I sat down again beside her and touched her brow. I had thought to find her warm with fever, but her skin was cold to the touch and damp.
All night her sleep had been fitful. Now she seemed lost in a deeper sleep. Whether it was a healing sleep or the approach of death I couldn’t tell, but I had done all I knew how to do. I curled up at her feet and fell asleep.
* * *
The healer dipped her fingers into the bowl, pulled out a pinch of the spent herbs, and tasted them.
“You’ve done her no good by this,” she told me. “You may have given her a few more days of pain. That’s all.”
I deserved her reprimand, and I accepted it.
“Have you seen wounds like this before?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
“In a day or two it will be poisoned. The poison will kill her, and her death won’t be an easy one.”
The healer’s eyes held mine until she saw that I had understood her.
“She’s yours to care for now,” she said, and left the room.
Then I wondered if I’d done wrong. If I had been careless of my warrior’s pain, I had done her a far greater wrong than she had done to me. What I knew to be true was that I had wanted her to live, not for her own sake or because I cared for her, but so that I might have the satisfaction of her knowing that she owed her life to me.
My pride may have done more harm than good, and for that I was sorry, but I was still proud enough to resist my guilty feelings. If my warrior died, the healer was right and I was wrong, not only in her eyes and my own, but also in the eyes of the entire household. It was a shame I would not bring upon myself willingly, even if I did deserve it.
The healer had given her to me, so I began to do everything for her I could think of. I brewed her bloodwort tea to renew her blood and tea of dried comfrey root to mend her bones. I asked Sparrow to dig some fresh comfrey root and gather leaves of comfrey, sage, and shepherd’s purse. From the root I made a salve to treat her wound. The leaves I saved for poultices.
Day and night I stayed beside her. At night I lay across the bed at her feet and dozed, so that if she moved she would awaken me. Sparrow brought my meals to me. Sometimes she tried to persuade me to go to my own bed and rest. I refused. I believed that as long as I was there beside my warrior, death would not dare to cross the threshold, but that if I left her, she would leave me.
I had never tended anyone so ill. When she burned with fever, I bathed her with cool water and gave her a tea of willow bark. When she shook with chills, I lay beside her and warmed her with my body. I washed her wound with sage water and treated it with poultices to draw the poison out. I soaked bread in broth and fed her, though she would take only a mouthful at a time. I talked to her spirit. I named the colors of the world that I could see from the window. I reminded her of every good thing about living I could think of, so that she would be less willing to leave this world behind. Day after day went by, and my warrior didn’t die.
I lost track of time. Later Sparrow told me it had been nearly a fortnight. Then one morning, just before dawn, Maara woke me. She was restless, and I worried she would hurt herself, so I lay down beside her to hold her still. She turned away from me onto her side and fell into a deep sleep. She felt warm, but not feverish. Her breathing was quiet and easy. It was the first time I had held her without feeling that my arms around her were all that kept her spirit trapped within her body. I knew then that she would live. I thanked the Mother for my warrior’s life and followed her into sleep.
I woke to find her watching me. I had slept so soundly I hardly knew where I was. From the light pouring through the cracks in the shutter, I saw that it must already be midmorning.
I sat up and reached out to touch her brow to check for fever. She drew back and turned her face away from me. Instantly I was furious with her. All the bitterness I had ever felt toward her surged into my chest. For days I had contended with the Dark Mother for her life. I opened my mouth to tell her so and choked on my tears. As soon as I wiped them away, more fell. I didn’t understand myself where those tears came from.
Then Maara looked at me. She spoke so softly I almost didn’t hear her.
“Sorry,” she said.
* * *
The Lady Merin came into the room. When she saw that my warrior was asleep, she whispered, “The healer told me she would die.”
“She very nearly did,” I said.
“The healer says you saved her life.”
I shook my head. I would not take credit for it. Whatever I had done had been done for the wrong reasons, and there was no merit in it.
“She’s stronger than the healer thought,” I said. “It was her own doing, not mine.”
The Lady looked at me, surprised, but she left the room without saying anything more.
* * *
Maara was still too weak to do anything for herself. I fed her and bathed her and tended her wound, just as I had done before, but now she was aware of me. Every intimate thing I had to do for her she made more difficult. Her eyes never left my face. Her dark and solemn eyes followed me with questions, though she hardly said a word.
I no longer felt that I could lie with her in her bed, so I brought my bedding from the companions’ loft and laid it out on the floor. All of this she watched. She’d slept for days. Now she refused to sleep.
Sleeping potions are so powerful that I was afraid to give her one until she grew stronger. Instead I bathed her with warm water and rubbed her back. I coaxed her body into sleep, and while she slept, I lay down on my own bed and got what rest I could.
After three days I could no longer bear her eyes. They watched me with a frankness I was unused to. Sometimes I thought I read in them an accusation. It must have been my own guilty conscience. She couldn’t have known what I had done, and even if she did, why would she have faulted me for doing it? After all, she was alive. But I needed to set things right with her.
“Do you wonder why the healer hasn’t come to you?” I asked her.
“I think you are my healer,” she replied.
“No,” I said. “I’m not a healer. I learned what my mother could teach me. That’s all.”
She waited.
“The healer believed you would die,” I said. “She wanted to give you a painless death. I disobeyed her. I wanted you to live.”
“Why?”
I wish I had heard her then, but I felt the color of shame rise into my face, and I wanted to say what I had resolved to say and get it over with.
“I was angry with you,” I told her. “I wanted to make you live, so that you would have to respect me and so that I would have a claim on you.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes. I had once envisioned her telling me that she was sorry for the way she’d treated me. Now she would have reason to believe I was unworthy of her.
She said nothing for a time, while my own words echoed in my head. What I had said was true, but I was beginning to believe there was a deeper truth that I was missing.
“You have what you wanted,” she said at last. “I owe you a debt, and I will be careful to repay it.”
Her words slid over my skin like ice. “I do not have what I wanted! I wanted an honorable place here, and I have disgraced myself in my own eyes. Now I’m disgraced in your eyes. You owe me nothing. I want nothing from you.”
Her dark eyes captured mine and held them. At first she seemed troubled, hurt perhaps, and angry. Then she cocked her head at me and pursed her lips and knit her brow into a puzzled frown.
“I’m not sure I understand you,” she said. “Are you telling me you saved my life because you were angry with me?”
The idea struck me funny.
“Yes,” I said, trying not to smile. “Furious.”
“Furious?”
“Enraged,” I said.
“Oh dear.” And then she smiled.
* * *
There was a lightness in my spirit that I hadn’t felt since I came to Merin’s house, and I had my warrior to thank for it. As I lay in my bed that night, I thought about her smile. I wanted to fix her image in my mind’s eye, so that the next time she gave me one of her scowls, I would have at least one smile to remember. Her smile told me, not that she forgave me, but that she found nothing to forgive. No matter the reason, she may have been alive that night because of me. It was the first time I had allowed myself to think it. She may have been alive that night because I had cared for her, and whether or not I had cared for her when I undertook to save her life, I cared for her now. If anything I’d done had made the difference whether she lived or died, it was a gift I had given, not only to my warrior, but to myself.
* * *
The next day I went to see the healer. It was a cool day, and I found her sitting with several of the older women at a table in the kitchen. They were enjoying the heat from the ovens, sipping hot tea, and gossiping among themselves. When I approached the healer, they all fell silent.
“I need to speak with you,” I told her.
“Speak, then,” she replied.
The others started to get up, but I asked them to stay and hear me. They must know what I had done, and I wanted them to hear me try to make amends for it.
“I disobeyed you,” I said to the healer. “I was wrong to do that. Even though my warrior didn’t die, what I did was no less wrong.”
The healer looked around at the others.
“What do you think?” she asked them.
They stared back at her with blank faces.
“I think,” the healer said, and drummed her fingers on the table, “I think she should be wrong more often.”
One of the women chuckled at that, then another, and soon they were all laughing. Although I didn’t find it funny, I was glad to know I hadn’t made an enemy.
That evening the healer came to my warrior’s room and examined her.
“She’s healing well,” she said. She turned and met my eyes. “Now I think you understand what it is to take a life into your care.”
4 STORIES
As she recovered, my warrior was more difficult to care for than she had been when she lay dying. She was so restless that she did herself no good. To keep her quiet and to help her pass the time, I told her stories. They were the tales I’d heard told beside our hearth fire every night of my childhood. To my amazement, she had never heard them.
“No one told stories much where I grew up,” she said.
“Where did you grow up?” I asked her. I couldn’t imagine a place where no one told stories. “Far away from here,” she said. In her voice I heard, not only sadness, but a warning, and I was afraid to ask her anything more.
* * *
“In ancient days, when only women were warriors — ”
“When was that?” she said.
“I don’t know. A long time ago, I suppose.”
“How long ago?”
“I have no idea. It’s not important. It’s just the way you start a story.”
“Why?”
“All stories begin like that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They just do.”
“Oh,” she said.
“In ancient days, when only women were warriors — ”
“Were there once only women warriors?” she said.
“I don’t know. I suppose so.”
“Why was that, I wonder?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just the way you start a story.”
“Oh,” she said.
I waited.
“Are you going to tell the story?” she said.
“Are you ready to listen to it?”
She nodded.
“In ancient days, when only women were warriors…”
I paused and looked at her. She shut her mouth tight and said not a word.
“In ancient days, when only women were warriors, lived a woman who had two daughters. One was tall, with hair like spun gold and skin the color of milk and eyes bluer than the sky. She sang so sweetly that when they heard her voice, songbirds fell silent. She spun wool into the finest thread and dyed it all the colors of the rainbow. She wove it into the most lovely cloth ever made by woman’s hand.
“Her sister was as unlike her as it was possible to be. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, brown-skinned. Though she was smaller than her sister, she was stronger. She had broad shoulders, and the muscles of her arms and legs were hard under the skin. She was a master of the bow. Her arrows could find a bird in flight or a deer in the thicket.”
“I’ve heard this one before,” Maara said.
She turned over in the bed so that she had her back to me.
“You have?” I asked her. “Where?”
“You must have told it already.”
“I didn’t.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said.
* * *
“What story was it?” asked Sparrow.
“The one about the two sisters,” I said.
“The fair and the dark?”
“Yes.”
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
Sparrow shook her head at me. I had no idea what I’d done.
“Describe the dark sister,” she said.
“Dark-haired, dark-eyed, brown-skinned. Strong. Broad-shouldered.”
“Does that sound like anyone you know?”
It did. It sounded like my warrior.
“She thought you were making fun of her,” Sparrow said.
“Why would she think I would do that?”
“She’s from a clan of the old ones.”
Sparrow’s explanation made no sense to me. “We’re descended from the old ones too.”
“True,” she said, “but the blood of many tribes runs in us.”
“My mother’s mother had a shield friend among the old ones.”
“There are few of them left now. Your warrior’s people are almost gone. The last tribes live far to the north. We hardly ever see them anymore. She’s the only one I’ve ever known to speak to.”
“But why would she think I would make fun of her?” I said. “My people have always honored the old ones. We tell stories about them, and when a child is born with midnight eyes, we give her one of the ancient names, because she must be one of our first mothers come back to us.”
“Those traditions are dying here,” said Sparrow. “More and more they give the dark ones back.”
I had heard that expression only once before, and when I asked what it meant, I was told that some tribes take unwanted children and abandon them in the wilderness, to die of cold or hunger or to be taken by wolves. I couldn’t imagine such a thing.
“Do you mean they let them die?” I said.
Sparrow nodded. She saw the confusion in my eyes. “Many tribes have much less than we do here. In times of hunger they can’t feed all their children. They do what they must.”
“But why the dark ones?” I asked her. “In my family we rejoice when one of them is born to us. They have special gifts. They speak with the gods.”
“Nowadays no one has much use for the old gods or the old ways.”
We heard the voice of Sparrow’s warrior, Eramet, calling her.
“Talk to the old woman who sleeps at the kitchen hearth,” said Sparrow. “She can tell you more than I can about how the world has changed.”
For a while after Sparrow left, I sat in the companions’ loft thinking over what she had told me. How little I knew of the world beyond my village.
Even the people of this household, joined to my family by long tradition, seemed strange to me in their ways. What I had just heard shocked me. If people of the same tribe could believe so differently, how would I ever understand the world?
I returned to my warrior’s room and sat down beside her on the bed. She was just as I had left her. Her eyes were closed, but I didn’t think she was asleep.
“In ancient days, when only women were warriors,” I began, “lived a woman who had two daughters. One was tall, with hair like spun gold and skin the color of milk and eyes bluer than the sky.”
“I told you I didn’t want to hear it,” she said.
“It’s bad luck to leave a story partly told. It hangs in the air and echoes in your ears until you finish it.”
In ancient days, when only women were warriors, lived a woman who had two daughters. One was tall, with hair like spun gold and skin the color of milk and eyes bluer than the sky. She sang so sweetly that when they heard her voice, songbirds fell silent. She spun wool into the finest thread and dyed it all the colors of the rainbow. She wove it into the most lovely cloth ever made by woman’s hand.
Her sister was as unlike her as it was possible to be. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, brown-skinned. Though she was smaller than her sister, she was stronger. She had broad shoulders, and the muscles of her arms and legs were hard under the skin.
She was a master of the bow. Her arrows could find a bird in flight or a deer in the thicket. She spoke with the spirits of the animals and learned their secrets. She knew the language of the four winds and the songs sung by rain. She could count the number of the days since the world was made.
When the time came for the sisters to marry, the fair one chose a man of her own people. She and her husband were happy together, but to their sorrow, she bore no child. The dark sister chose not to marry. She was content to live alone in the forest, and her sister saw her less and less as the years went by.
One day the dark sister heard her sister singing. The song was such a sad one that she left her forest home and traveled to her sister’s house.
“Why is your song so sad?” she asked.
Her sister said to her, “I have no hope of children. Our people will die with us, unless you bear a child.”
The dark sister had no desire for a child, but her sister’s sadness weighed on her heart. When she left her sister’s house, she wandered through the burial places of their people. She sat among the cairns and felt the sun warm across her back and the cooling breeze that caressed her face.
For the first time she understood that she had come out into the light for only a short while and that the day would come when her bones would rest in the dark under the stones. Who then would sit among the cairns on a bright spring day and remember those who had gone beyond the sunset?
The dark sister returned to the heart of the forest, to a grove where there rose out of a rock a freshwater spring. She knelt down beside it. Around the spring a pool of black water reflected her face back to her. She called upon the spirit of the spring to teach her what to do.
“How can I conceive a child?” she asked. “There is no man I would take to husband me, nor any I would lie beside.”
A breath of air disturbed the surface of the pool. Before she could stop herself, she fell forward into it. Small hands took hers and pulled her down. In the dark water her eyes were blind, but she heard a woman’s voice that calmed her and felt the woman’s hands caress her face.
“Tell me why you ask for a child,” the woman said.
“There will be no one to enjoy the world when we are gone,” she replied. “When we are gone, there will be no one to remember us and no one to keep our stories alive in the daylight.”
“Other children will tell other stories,” the woman said.
“But not ours,” said the dark sister, “and our stories reach deep, even to the roots of the world.”
Then the spirit of the spring embraced her and kissed her mouth.
“Take this kiss to your sister,” she said.
The tiny hands released her, and she floated up through the water until she broke the surface and found herself back in her own world beneath the trees.
The dark sister went at once to her sister’s house, and when her sister came to greet her, she kissed her sister’s mouth and conceived in her a child.
When the child was born, it seemed that sometimes she was dark like her dark mother, and yet at other times she was as fair as the one who bore her. She sang so sweetly that when they heard her voice, songbirds fell silent. She knew the language of the four winds and the songs sung by rain. She could count the number of the days since the world was made. Her children were many, and they filled the land. They sat among the cairns in springtime and told the stories that reach deep, even to the roots of the world.
“How can a woman conceive by another woman?” Maara asked.
I shrugged. I’d never thought about it.
“I don’t think I understand your stories.”
“They’re not meant to be understood any more than the world can be understood.”
“What are they for, then?”
I thought for a moment before I answered her. I had been told stories all my life. I never stopped to wonder what they were for. I had heard them over and over, and every time I heard them, they kindled a warm feeling in the center of my chest, as if one of the puzzles of the world had just unraveled and made itself clear to me, although I could never have explained what the puzzle was or told its answer.
At last I reached out my hand and laid my palm over Maara’s heart.
“They’re meant to make you feel something here,” I said. “When I was a child, the stories told me that the world was as it should be, and that I was a part of it, and that every question has an answer.”
* * *
“Does she ever talk to you?” the Lady asked me.
“Sometimes,” I replied. “A little.”
“Does she talk of where she came from?”
“No,” I said. “Where did she come from?”
“She never told me,” the Lady said. “She came to me in wintertime. In weather no one should have traveled in, she came to my door. She asked me to admit her to my service. She claimed to have no family and no clan, and nowhere else to go. She was ill-clad and hungry. I couldn’t turn her out to die in the snow, so she made her oath to me, and I accepted it.”
“How can she have no clan?”
“They may all have died of disease or famine, or she may have been a slave. Perhaps her mistress freed her or she ran away.”
“Slaves can’t be warriors,” I said.
“No slave can be a warrior here. What others do, who can say? The customs of the northerners are not like ours. I believe your warrior used to make her home among them, although she has never told me so.”
The Lady’s eyes caught mine then, and she leaned toward me.
“I need your help,” she said. “I know so little of her. There is always a chance that she has been sent by some northern tribe that would use her to learn our weaknesses.”
I stared at the Lady in disbelief. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“You know her very little. How can you be sure?”
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