The Foretelling (2 page)
If only it had been that way with all our neighbors.
We were warriors because we had to be; the world we lived in was a battlefield. In truth, everything of importance that I knew about being a leader I learned from my mother, the woman without a shadow. It was not that she instructed me — she who would not speak to me or look at me — but that I studied her from afar. When my mother rose up from the steppes where they'd left her for dead she arose as something new. She had no pity and no regret. She cut through her enemies as though they were wheat and nothing more.
On the wood and leather quiver in which my mother kept her bronze-tipped arrows, there were forty-eight small red half moons, marks for the men she'd killed in battle. They weren't the fifty cowards from the time before my birth, but they would do. As a child I saw her in battle only once, when men from the other side of the Black Sea attacked us while we slept. The children were woken and herded together, but I saw Alina and her warriors run for their horses. I understood then why my mother was our Queen. She was like a whirlwind I could not keep sight of: She rode crouched low on her horse, as though they were one, skin-to-skin sisters.
All the while the Queen raced across the steppe her scythe was directed at the enemy; it was as though in exchange for her lost shadow she had been granted the power to guide her horse not with touch but with a single thought, as my great-grandmother had done. This was the power of a true warrior. Her mind. Her will.
On her hands, my mother wore a pair of lions’ claws my grandmother had given her. In battle, she was terrible. A lion with long black hair. Some people said the men she fought were hypnotized by her. They dropped to their knees when they saw her. She appeared to them as a monster who was beautiful beyond belief. How could they fight her? What could they do?
Our enemies ran from her and scattered like leaves, red leaves, fallen leaves.
I thought that was what a true leader was, fierce and victorious, as my grandmother had been and my great-grandmother and now my beautiful and brutal mother. I thought what the world we were living in was, it always would be. I didn't understand that one season was quickly devoured by the next, leaving behind bones and memories. I was watching that happen, the way I watched the clouds move past us, high above our people.
We lived in a time of sorrow and blood, the time of Queens and cruelty, where every man was our enemy, and every horse lost in battle could mean a warrior's life.
Wave after wave of our enemies came. More all the time. They wanted open land like ours. We had so much of it the earth stretched from summer to winter, from the parched yellow lands to the mountains. Time after time we defended ourselves. Blood, heart, bones were strewn across the steppes. There for the birds to pick at. There to sink into the yellow earth. We didn't think whether we were wrong or right to live the way we did, or whether there was another way. We didn't mourn the men whose spirits we took. It was the time of fighting well or dying instead.
When I heard Astella and Asteria's war cries, I shivered. I did not feel like a coward, but I felt different from the women who charged out onto the steppes, their scythes and bows raised, courage their only shield.
One day Astella came back from the battle with her face cleaved nearly in two; the mark of an enemy's axe that would scar her forevermore. Sin had to be carried to her tent, and watched over through the nights. When she recovered she would no longer walk by the river lest she see herself. She who was afraid of nothing was now reminded of true terror by a single mark of war, a war that never seemed to end, that came to us as surely as the fat white moon.
Even when I was too young to go to war, I understood what it meant: Some of our sisters never returned. At night, their ghosts wandered the steppes, so cold in winter their bones rattled, so parched in summer their shadows burned to ash in the tall yellow grass. Could there be a reason for so much death, one only a Queen or a prophecy woman could understand?
Someday I would be Queen. It was my destiny. But I could not wait for an answer. My head was filled with the fallen. Especially when the rain fell, they seemed to be by my side.
I went to Deborah, the wisest of all. We walked to the windy place that made me feel hollow inside. It was far out in the grasslands, a place that seemed made at the beginning of all things. The goddess was everywhere around us. I felt tiny under the huge sky above us. I could see the shadows of the warriors we had lost in the yellow dust.
I could not yet see the future, but I wanted knowledge poured into me. I wanted my questions answered. I asked why our people had to give their lives in battle. Why the goddess didn't protect us from such a fate. Deborah whispered so that no one else could hear. Her voice sounded like the voice of the raven, difficult to understand, yet perfectly clear.
We are only an instant, that's true. But we are eternal.
I
N THE DREAMS OF
our people there was always a horse.
As infants we rode in the arms of the women who raised us. Our first lullabies were made out of women's voices and of horses, bone and hide and hair. The echo of a thousand hooves on the yellow earth, hot breath that melted the snow, manes that were our blankets, the wind that sang us to sleep as we galloped, flying over rocks and grasslands and streams.
In every dream I'd ever had there was a black horse, the same one, every time. He was far away, past the grasslands, in the tall mountains we had to cross to reach our winter campground. He was so distant, yet I could see him clearly: storm cloud-colored, onyx-colored.
In dreams I could not catch the black horse, no matter how I might try. Some mornings I woke from sleep, breathless, my legs aching as though I had run all the way to the sea. When I opened my eyes all I could see were the prophecy women, dressed in their dark robes, breathing softly, like horses, sleeping beneath their horsehide blankets.
As the next leader in battle, I needed to learn every skill, from weaving to throwing an axe. To understand is to command, that's what Deborah had told me. That's what she had told my mother when Alina was a girl.
I learned from the best. Asteria taught me to use the axe and the bow, but it was Astella who had taught me to ride. I spent as much of my childhood among the horses as I did with the priestesses, and by the time I was twelve had become the best rider of any girl my age, nearly as good as Astella herself. The other girls distrusted my skill. Even some warriors were jealous: I could stand in a field and wild horses would come to me, unafraid. I could ride for hours and never tire. I spoke our sisters’ language, just as Astella had instructed me. I had learned to be one with a horse, not to fight it or force it, but to be a sister through and through.
I thought horse thoughts. I dreamed horse dreams. They were all filled with grass and open sky and the steppes that stretched on forever, wild thoughts and dreams for which there were no words in our own language.
When I rode I was no different from the creature I rode upon. The wind was the same to both of us. The ground shuddered beneath us.
I was ready to ride into battle, but none of our people had her own horse until her thirteenth summer. That was the passage into the life of a warrior: the gift of a horse.
When my time came, I waited for the gift I was sure would come from my mother. I watched the Queen on her great gray mare whose name meant Pearl, just like the precious ring Alina wore on her right hand. But my mother still wouldn't look at me, not even when I brought her mare to her, brushed and shining like the inside of a shell from the farthest shore of the Black Sea.
I waited throughout my thirteenth summer. Astella waited with me, assuring me our Queen would know it was my time. Time to be a warrior and to ride my own mare. But the summer moved forward and there was nothing. Heat waves, hawks, clear white-hot skies. No sign of our Queen.
One evening when I was feeding the horses, Asteria rode up to meet her cousin. Now that Astella's face had been cleaved in two she looked like a reflection in the river, distorted and watery; her left eye was always filled with tears. She looked like a weakling while Asteria, with her shaven skull decorated with its fierce bear tattoo, seemed too ferocious to speak to. I stayed where I was, feeding the horses.
You're not crying over that stupid girl, are you?
Asteria said to her cousin.
Little Yellow Eyes.
It took me a while before I realized she meant me. I was the stupid one. A girl and nothing more. I looked down and saw my feet were coated with dust. I felt I was disappearing. No one could see me.
I'm not crying at all,
Astella responded to her cousin. Of the two, she might have been the fiercer in battle, even though her hair was long and her face destroyed. She did not give up easily and her bravery was legend. It was said she pulled the enemy's axe out of her own flesh without once crying out loud.
What's fair is fair,
Astella said.
Rain is thirteen and it's time for her to have a horse of her own.
I'll tell the Queen.
Asteria laughed. I was the one who fed and watered Asteria's horse. I was the one to calm her war-horse if a snake or a hawk passed by.
I'm sure it's her main concern.
She smirked.
You can see how our Alina dotes on her daughter.
I understood. I was nothing to my mother. Sorrow and no more.
And then one day when I rose from sleep with thoughts of the black horse in my head, I heard something outside my tent. Right away I recognized the pure high voice of the one who would be my horse. I ran outside into the already-cold morning. Summer was leaving, but it was not too late. I was still thirteen.
I wished it had been my mother who had chosen my horse. I wished she had been the one to come to me with my gift. But there was Astella holding on to the training rope. She had been working with a wild mare secretly, all summer long.
The horse I was given was white, just as my great-grandmother's horse had been. She was too beautiful to be spoken to, so I called her to me by bowing and lowering my head the way I'd seen the wild horses do. I called my sister-horse our word for Sky, and like the sky, Astella said, she would always be changing. In winter, my mare would disappear in a world of snow, just what a warrior wanted, to be invisible to her enemy. In the summer, the yellow dust would rise up from the steppes and cling to Sky, and once again she would disappear in battle. Our enemy would not see my mare until she was upon them, with me on her back, my slingshot or bow aimed low at the scattering man-beasts.
There were some little children who were afraid of Astella now because of the way she looked, the deep wound that split her face to the bone. But I went to her and dropped to my knees; I swore my gratitude forevermore.
Stand up,
Astella said.
I am the one who is grateful. I vow my loyalty.
For an instant I felt that all things were possible.
That I was, indeed, a Queen.
All through my thirteenth year I practiced. I did not stop until I was the rider I imagined my great-grandmother must have been. I wanted to ride as she had, flying with my eyes closed, better than anyone. It was pride and something more: It was who I was.
In time I could stand on my horse's back and ride at full speed. I could turn around twice, then three times, then four. I could ride hidden from view, backward, so I could spy if there were enemies behind me. Other girls laughed and ran through the grass and swam in the river. As for me, I rode. Even when I was better than anyone else, it wasn't enough. I wanted to ride through clouds. I wanted to ride into dreams. I wanted to go faster than any woman ever had before, and if others envied me for that, so be it.
It was a man who actually helped me do what others could not, who gave me the gift that allowed me to surpass even Astella. He was the single man who lived among us, captured long ago, a smith who'd been made lame so he could not run away. They say that smiths are magicians and the things they make out of iron and bronze and fire are the work of the goddess, her blood and bone. Our man made bronze arrowheads and heavy scythes, the best we'd ever had. For my horse, he fashioned something special.
For the next Queen,
he said to me in his broken language. Most of our people stayed away from the smith. He was ugly and his voice sounded like stones hitting together, but he didn't seem like a monster. Perhaps he was hoping for his freedom someday when he spoke kindly to me, waiting for the time when I would be Queen. Perhaps I'd grant it to him in exchange for his gift.
Our stirrups were flimsy, usually made out of horsehide, but the smith made mine of brass covered by hide. These were so strong they could hold my weight as if I were a feather or a single Made of grass. Because of them I could do what other riders could not. I rode with one foot in the stirrup, a part of my white mare, a cloud to her sky. I crouched beside my mare, close to one side. Then I stood and leapt over her back to the other side. I practiced for battle, when I would slip beneath Sky, riding under her belly with her like the sky over me, protecting me.