When Women Were Warriors Book I: The Warrior's Path Read online

  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.”