Covered with snow, I looked like a ghost, fierce as a spirit from beneath the ice. And then when spring came, and the wheat and grass came alive, I turned green with the fresh new world. I knew people spoke of me when they thought I couldn't hear; they called me the
Dream Rider
because I did things others could only dream about. They all gathered round when they heard my horse could leap the water at the bend of the river. But of all the people who came to watch the jump Sky and I had practiced hundreds of times, one was missing.
The only one who mattered to me.
We did not touch the water. We clattered onto the rocks on the other side. A whoop went up from the other side. But I hardly cared.
She never came to see.
When the men from beyond the north came the following summer, the earth was white and yellow, sober and brittle and sharp. There hadn't been much rain and the land had become hard-packed. There was drought, and drought meant war. People wanted water, they wanted our river.
Our priestesses told us that the hard land meant our success in all things. We expected nothing less. The men who came over the steppes had fought and conquered the red-haired men of the north storms and now they thought they would conquer us. They were beasts from the icy lands. Half-man, half-animal was the word that preceded them, adept at the axe, wild as wolves. They believed they'd found the land of a thousand wives, but instead they had found death. Ours or theirs, only the battle would reveal.
I dreamed again of the black horse on the night before war. When I woke everything was silent. This time I wouldn't be staying home with the children. I had passed a warrior's rightful age. I had been given the gift of a horse. Everything I had ever learned would be put to use in the days to come.
I would live or not depending on how good a student I had been.
When our enemies first saw us we must have looked like bees as much as we did women, streaked yellow, screaming for war, riding our horses as though we were flying over the tall grass, over the hardpacked earth. There seemed to be thunder even before we reached our enemy, at least to our own ears. To them we hoped we sounded exactly like what we were: their defeat.
I rode to battle with the prophecy women, the women in black. After the fighting, they took care of the dead. I wanted to ride with the archers, alongside Asteria and Astella, but Astella instructed me to stay with the youngest warriors, whose duty it was to protect our priestesses and then help them send our people on to the next world if they should fall. We buried many in that time. We washed them clean and covered them with honey. We sent them to the next world with their weapons beside them.
The battle was right in front of us. I wanted to get on my horse and ride into the middle of the war. I had to pinch myself to keep from whispering in my horse's ear to ride the way we did when we practiced, faster than the ravens could fly, fastest of all.
We could hear screaming and the cold sound of iron and brass. We could smell blood, a thick scent that filled up your head so that you couldn't see or hear. Our fallen were brutally killed, hacked up, often unrecognizable. I stumbled upon Jarona, an archer not much older than myself. When I saw what they'd done to her, I made a gasping noise and shamed myself by bringing up all that I'd eaten that day, a few bites of meat and some mares’ milk.
But we had so many of our dead to collect I stopping thinking about what I was doing and kept to my work. We spoke idly, to forget about blood. I told my dreams of the night before. The only dream I'd ever had was of a black horse. Without warning, a priestess leaned over and slapped me.
Deborah grabbed me away. I didn't fight her. I listened when the high priestess spoke; I was in awe of her great gift of prophecy.
Keep jour dreams to yourself,
she told me.
Then Deborah whispered what the dream of the black horse meant. It meant death. We had dogs that followed our camp, some of which lived in the tents; it was said these dogs alone could see that same black horse, the earthly form of the Angel of Death, a creature that was invisible to most eyes. Except, it seemed, to mine.
Every dog was howling that day. They saw that the Angel could not be stopped, not by arrows, not by the battles we fought, not by any dreams.
Half of our people were lost in the fields, and those who came back were covered with blood. Our sisters left teeth and bone and flesh in that place where the grass was so tall men could easily hide, at least for a while. Until we were done with them.
When the battle was over the silence reminded me of the silence that followed my dream. Our people were quick to depart from the dead of our enemies, leaving them to the wolves and the ravens. I alone got off my horse to look at the defeated, but I didn't find what I was searching for. A man with yellow eyes, like mine.
By staying behind, I saw things our people turned away from when they rode away in victory. All around me were the faces of the fallen. They were our enemy, but their agony was a bitter thing to see, especially those who were still in our world, although barely. Blood ran from them and made black pools. I tried not to think of the creatures as human, but as something else, as beasts.
All the same, when I walked through what was left of them, I felt something rising inside me. Our word for this is never used. It is a curse upon our own people when speaking of our enemies.
Mercy.
I chased away all the ravens, running after them until they took flight. Then I shouted the word we must never say aloud in the field of the dying. Before it was spoken, it burned my mouth.
That is why it was forbidden. It hurt too much to say.
After a battle, our people celebrated. We did not lose because we could not. Victory was not a matter of choice; it was a necessity, life itself. Losing meant our people would be gone, a drop of blood on the hard yellow ground. Disappeared.
Our people painted their faces with cinnabar and ochre; they dressed in amulets and amber. They drank koumiss, the fermented mares’ milk that made them so dizzy even the wounded could remember how to laugh.
That was how our people rid themselves of the memory of battle: the way men screamed like children, the way our people were cut to pieces when they fell from our sister-horses onto the ground. We forgot in a dreamworld of our own making; we drank and danced until the recent past was far away, and then, farther still.
Sometimes after a war had been won there was a festival that men were brought to, those we had captured and had let live. But a girl could only go if she had killed three men in battle; that meant she was a woman as well as a warrior, ready to have a child. Babies grow into warriors, and that was who we were.
Our Queen never went to the festival. She had no need for men; she already had her daughter. Not that she looked for me after the battle with the men from the ice country. A person didn't need the gift of prophecy to understand how she'd come to name me Rain, to mark the thousands of tears she might have cried the day the fifty cowards trapped her.
All the same, the battle had been my first taste of war. I thought perhaps I might approach the Queen and ask for a blessing. That I might ask for guidance so that in the next battle I would slaughter as many men as came before me, fifty if possible, a hundred if I could, like a true Queen-to-be.
When we returned to our city of tents, my mother went to the edge of the stream where we took our water in summer. I followed her. She was giving gratitude to the goddess. She was the Queen, but humble still.
I was about to go forward when I saw that there was a woman standing in the shadow of the Queen. She was a slave from the north, with ropes of red hair, long-limbed and fair, forced into servitude by the enemy we had vanquished. The slave was covered with tattoos — not the blue-black lines we wore on our cheekbones and wrists to mark our blood and our battles. Every bit of her face and body was covered by red circles and swirls that could make you dizzy if you stared for too long, images that moved should you happen to blink.
When my mother knelt to drink from the stream, the slave hurried before her and drew the water for our Queen. She got down on her hands and knees. I heard my mother say,
You don't have to do that. You're free here.
Instead of asking for a blessing, I crouched beside the rocks. I heard the river rushing as though it was inside my own head. I had never heard such kindness from the Queen, certainly never for me.
I saw that the swirling things tattooed on the slave's body were snakes; in some places this was the mark of a woman forced to give her body away to men. There were scars down her back and arms, made carefully, purposefully, to bind her to her owner. I could see sorrow all over her. Her name was Penthe — it sounded like a breath when my mother said it.
My mother didn't turn from the slave's sorrow as she turned away from me. I knew love when I saw it, as clearly as I knew sorrow. Penthe took my mother's hands. There was blood and dirt caked on the Queen's hands, but Penthe kissed them both, at the wrist, in the place where we are tattooed for the very first time.
I was jealous to see that my mother could love someone.
Penthe shared the Queen's tent from that first night. If anyone thought it improper for a Queen to lie alongside one who'd been a slave, they didn't dare speak of it.
I didn't realize until the next morning that Penthe had not come to us alone. Sleeping in that crumpled heap by the side of the Queen's tent was Penthe's daughter, Io. I was sneaking up to hear what went on when two women were in love, when I stumbled upon her. A chalky girl with the same long red hair as her mother. The henna tattoos covered half her face and most of her arms. She was my age, but the tattoos were the mark that she'd been used by men. I had already decided to hate Penthe, and I quickly decided to hate Io as well. Meanness rose inside of me. I thought of the blessing I hadn't gotten from my mother.
Don't look at me,
I told Io.
She did not truly understand our language. She stared at me and wouldn't stop.
Our people had been taught not to get too close to the Queen, out of respect, certainly, but also out of fear. Because I was to be next, people knew to avoid me as well. The girls my age especially had little to do with me, more so since I had become the best rider of all. They got out of my way and that was fine with me. I did as I pleased, alone, the way I liked it. Always alone.
But Io knew none of this; she followed me from the beginning. She called me
sister,
though I ignored her. She was afraid of things and I laughed at her. Why shouldn't I? She was nothing to me. A wisp. A frightened slave. She cared nothing about being a warrior. She was especially afraid of horses. While we were training, Io sat sewing with thread made from a horse's tail, fixing a tear in my tent. When she saw Cybelle's beehives she was so terrified by the buzzing within, she hid behind a tree. I must have wanted her to be afraid; that day I helped Cybelle smoke the bees away and I fanned the smoke in Io's direction.
When the bees chased her, Io screamed and ran and I laughed. I had no need of a sister or anything else.
I've never seen you so mean,
Cybelle said.
Will you be a cruel Queen when your time comes?
We were coated in mud to make sure that the bees, our good neighbors, wouldn't sting us. It was wise to be careful even with the best of friends.
Isn't every Queen cruel?
I asked.
Even among bees? As for Io, let her run. All the way back to the north storm country where she belongs.
The weak are cruel,
Cybelle said to me.
The strong have no need to be.
However mean I might be, Io insisted on following me. Cruelty didn't seem to matter in this case. She remained convinced she belonged to me; even when I rode my horse as fast as I could, she ran after me, trudging along until she was covered with yellow dust with bits of grass threaded into her red hair.
Worst of all, Io had taken to sleeping outside my tent. Penthe had told her she must find a place for herself, and none of the other girls would have anything to do with her. People were laughing at her curled up with a blanket in the chilly night air, and soon they were laughing at me. They said I had a red-haired slave like my mother. She was a know-nothing. Useless.
Go away,
I cried.
Leave me be.
A Queen should not be laughable. Even a Queen-to-be.
But Io wouldn't stop acting as though she were my sister. The cruder I was, the kinder she became. Nothing could get rid of her, not insults, not the red ants I dropped in her blankets that made her itch at night. She continued to sing a beautiful song whose words I couldn't understand.
When I treated her badly, Io didn't seem to notice. Every night she slept beside my tent, shivering, when inside I had extra blankets I didn't care to share. I couldn't stand it anymore; the song she sang in a language I didn't understand got into my dreams. At night, my head was filled with that melody and the black horse that visited me while I slept.
I went outside into the starlight. The whole world seemed dark, except for Io's bright hair. She turned her face to me, happy to see me.
What do you want from me?
I said.
Io took off an amulet hung around her neck. It was a strand of leather decorated with seashells from far away, from the land of the north storm country. One shell was white, one was pink, one was the color of the blue ice in the deepest center of winter. Io had me hold the white shell to my ear, and although it was tiny I could hear water.
That's where I come from,
she told me.
Why would you give me a gift?
Since our mothers are together that means I'm your sister,
Io said.
I would never have a sister like you. Afraid of a shadow.
The things I'm afraid of aren't shadows,
Io said.
She sounded different then. When I looked at her I realized she knew more about some things than I did.