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

by Catherine M. Wilson

  “I’m not telling you that you can’t be her friend, but you can’t be more than that.”

  We stared at each other across the fire. It took me a minute to understand that she thought Sparrow and I were lovers. At first I was relieved that I could still be Sparrow’s friend and that this whole conversation had come from a misunderstanding, but before I could explain, she said, “I believe you when you tell me you want the best for Sparrow, but don’t deceive yourself. You must know in your heart that you’re going to lose what you had with her, that Vintel is going to keep at least that much away from you. It’s your own jealousy that hides behind your protest that Sparrow deserves better than Vintel.”

  Her accusation stunned me. Then I was furious with her, furious that she had presumed to tell me that my feelings were not what I believed them to be, that she was, in a way, calling me a liar.

  “You’re right,” I said. “This is none of your business.”

  I started to get up. She reached across the fire and took hold of my wrist, twisting it in a way that forced me to sit back down.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “If you’re going to disregard my advice, at least do it when no one but yourself will have to bear the consequences.”

  Although I knew that we were talking at cross-purposes, I was so angry with her that I didn’t try to make her understand. I glared at her and waited for her to release my arm. When she did, I got up and brushed the snow from my trousers. Without another word to her, I started back to Merin’s house.

  My anger blinded me as I blundered back along the half-broken trail we’d made that morning. Soon I was gasping for breath, and the cold air made my chest ache. I had to stop, and when I did, the pain that so often follows anger caught up with me. I tried to nurse my anger, to keep the pain away, but Maara’s words echoed in my head, and my anger yielded to the pain of knowing that she believed me guilty of both jealousy and self-deception.

  Anger. What had she tried to teach me about anger? Her words came back to me. Why do you care about Vintel’s opinion? Once I realized I didn’t care, Vintel’s insults had no power to hurt me, but I did care about Maara’s opinion of me. I cared very much. Nothing she had taught me about anger would help me this time.

  I looked back down the trail. I had assumed that Maara would follow me, but I didn’t see her. I waited for several minutes while I caught my breath. She didn’t come. When I looked for the smoke of her fire, I could neither see nor smell any trace of smoke in the air.

  Fear fluttered in the pit of my stomach. I tried to reason it away. The fire was too small to smoke. She was giving me time to think over what she’d said to me. I didn’t dare to wonder if she had no intention of coming home with me, but suddenly I knew I had to find her. The fact that I had more to fear from being alone in the winter woods so far from home never occurred to me.

  I quickly retraced my steps. I was relieved to find her where I’d left her. She looked up at me, her face expressionless. It was up to me to heal the breach between us.

  “I care what you think of me,” I blurted out. “I can’t pretend I don’t. It hurt to think I might have lost your good opinion.”

  She looked surprised. “It would take more than a little disagreement to do that.”

  Before I heard or understood her, I tried to explain, to her and to myself, why I had been so angry with her. Words tumbled over one another in my mouth. Even I couldn’t make much sense of them.

  “Tell me later,” she said. “Sit down. Let’s just be quiet for a while.”

  “I need to tell you—”

  “Hush,” she said. “You won’t find the truth in so much talk.”

  When I stopped talking, my trapped thoughts flew around like dry leaves in a whirlwind. A few times I forgot what she’d told me and opened my mouth to speak only to shut it again, until at last my mind began to let go of the thoughts that only chased their own tails inside my head.

  For a while I watched Maara out of the corner of my eye. Then I began to pay attention to the world around me. It was quiet. No wind stirred the trees. No birds called. No trickle of running water, no scurrying feet of forest animals broke the silence.

  I thought of Sparrow, and my heart grew heavy. Our friendship began when she was Eramet’s apprentice. As close as she had been to Eramet, she had made time for me. Now she was apprenticed to someone who might not allow her even to be my friend.

  In a way, Maara was right. I was afraid of Vintel’s power over Sparrow. I was jealous that someone who valued her so little should have such a claim on her, while someone who valued her as I did should have none at all. I sat an arm’s length from the woman who had risked so much to become my teacher and felt bereft.

  If I had been sitting with Maara in her room or in the great hall, I would have questioned her about what she’d said to me. There in the silent woods, I let my new knowledge of myself sift through my mind and settle around my heart. While Maara may have misunderstood my relationship with Sparrow, she understood my feelings better than I did myself.

  The shadows of the trees grew long. The light began to fade. I worried that we would have to walk home in the dark. As if she had heard my thoughts, Maara said, “The moon will rise early tonight. We’ll walk home by moonlight.”

  After the sun had set, I began to feel the cold. We were both wearing heavy tunics, which were warm enough as long as we were walking and even while we were sitting by the fire in daylight. Now that the sun was gone, I started to shiver.

  Maara had brought her winter cloak, rolled into a bundle slung over her shoulder. She unrolled it and draped it around her shoulders. Then she lifted one side and looked at me. I didn’t need a second invitation. I took the place she offered me.

  Our bodies warmed each other as the dark closed in around us. I closed my eyes. We were in the armory, where I couldn’t run away from her. I wanted to. Don’t run, she said. How could I? But I had, hadn’t I? I had run from her, was running from her, running through the snow. It was dark, and I blundered off the trail. I stopped and fell to my knees. She lifted me up.

  You are bound to me by an oath, she said.

  Yes.

  But it’s not the oath that binds us.

  What binds us?

  “It’s time to go,” she said.

  She got to her feet and took my arm to help me up. I stumbled against her, still half asleep. The moon had risen, giving us light enough to retrace our steps back home.

  § § §

  I woke to find Maara kneeling next to me, her hand resting on my shoulder.

  “Are you going to sleep all day?” she said.

  She had taken the shutter down, and light poured into the room. Cold air poured in too. I sat up in my bed and pulled my blankets up around me.

  Maara was already dressed.

  “Well?” she said. She stood in the doorway waiting for me.

  I stayed where I was, reluctant to exchange my warm blankets for the clothing that had hung out all night in the freezing air.

  “Are you tired? Shall I bring you something to eat?”

  I shook my head and got up. Maara waited while I got into my clothes. They were as cold as I thought they would be.

  While I dressed, Maara stood leaning against the doorpost, gazing past me out the window at the bright snowy world outside. I thought about our moonlight walk, about sitting with her in the woods, sharing her cloak and the warmth of the fire. I hadn’t felt a distance between us then, but I did this morning.

  “We didn’t talk yesterday,” I reminded her.

  Her eyes turned to me. “I thought we might have talked too much.”

  I was thinking of the silence we had shared, and of how an understanding of my own feelings had come of itself, clear and true, into my heart. How had she known that would happen?

  “You were right,” I said. “I was jealous of Vintel.”

  I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t find the words for what had been so clear to me the day before.
/>   “You don’t have to explain anything to me,” she said. “I wanted you to be aware of something that could bring trouble to both you and Sparrow. Now you’re aware of it. What you do about it is up to you.”

  Then I remembered that I hadn’t told her the most important thing. I hadn’t let her know that what she believed about my relationship with Sparrow wasn’t true.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sparrow is my friend.” I had intended to add, “not my lover,” but a sudden shyness stopped me. Instead I said, “That’s the most important thing to me.”

  “You won’t lose that,” Maara said. “Sparrow will honor your friendship whether Vintel approves or not. Vintel can’t command her feelings.”

  I didn’t know how to talk to her. I felt awkward and bashful, and the look of caution, almost of dread, on Maara’s face stopped me from saying more. Some things are just too intimate to talk about, even with the person closest to you.

  And how could I explain what Sparrow was to me? How could I deny she was my lover? It had been only the one time, but it had happened, and ever since, I had felt a new tenderness for her. I had never been close to anyone in the way I was close to Sparrow. It all seemed much too complicated to explain.

  20

  Secrets

  While the good weather lasted, Maara and I went out into the countryside almost every day. She showed me how to make snares from twisted strands of the inner bark of a certain bramble and how to set them out on a rabbit run. We caught a number of rabbits that way, and from the skins she made me a pair of leggings that covered my legs from the ankle to above the knee.

  I heard a few unkind remarks about how odd they looked, but I didn’t mind. I could walk all day through the snow, and my legs stayed dry and warm.

  Once, when we went to check one of our snares, we heard a rabbit scream in terror. A fox had discovered the rabbit helpless in the trap and was too preoccupied with it to notice our approach.

  Without taking her eyes from the fox, Maara knelt down and felt the earth beside her, until her fingers found a stone. With a sidearm throw I’d never seen before, she sent the stone at the fox’s head. The fox fell, stunned, and she ran over to it and slit its throat.

  She skinned the fox and dressed its body as if it were a rabbit. Then she made a fire and cooked it and gave me some to eat. The meat was tough and stringy, with a strong, bitter taste. I didn’t like it, but I believed she was testing me, and I forced myself to eat more than I wanted of it.

  She scowled at me.

  “If that had been the rabbit,” she said, “you would have eaten twice as much.”

  “I like rabbit,” I said.

  “Food is the distance you can travel in a day, and the cold you can withstand at night.”

  Reluctantly I reached out my hand for more.

  § § §

  Winter was coming to an end. As the days grew longer, our walks took us farther and farther from home.

  Maara saw it first, a dark, lumpy thing lying in a snowbank. At first I thought it might be one of our cattle, winter-killed, but when we drew near, I saw that it was the body of a man, clad in animal skins, lying face down in the snow.

  Maara turned him over. The sight sickened me. Animals had gnawed his face and hands. I thought that was why his hand was missing, until I saw the remnants of the bandage I had helped the healer to apply.

  “Oh,” I said. “He died.”

  “No,” said Maara. “Someone killed him.”

  The front of his leather shirt was stained a rusty brown. She pulled it up and showed me the wound under his heart, just a small cut where the blade went in, hardly enough, you would think, to kill a person.

  “Why did they kill him?” I asked her.

  My voice came out a whisper, although I hadn’t intended it to.

  She didn’t answer right away. She was searching through his clothing. In the pocket of his tunic she found a pouch that contained a set of firestones, some flint arrowheads, and a little carved statue of the Mother. Another pocket held a heel of bread.

  “Was it because he was hurt?” I asked. “Because he couldn’t keep up?”

  “His own people didn’t kill him.”

  Then I remembered the Lady asking Vintel if she would give up her right to take blood for the blood of Eramet. In my mind’s eye I saw Vintel’s face as she denied the bond between them.

  Maara continued her examination. From beneath his body she drew out a long, thin object wrapped in leather. The wrappings fell away to reveal a piece of dark wood, intricately carved and highly polished. It was a bow, only a little over half my height, while the bows I’d seen before were as tall as I or taller. It might have been a child’s bow except that it was much too heavy for a child. It was broad above and below the grip, tapering at the ends, and made of layers of wood and horn, all glued together. It had no bowstring but seemed none the worse for having spent the winter in a snowbank.

  Maara smiled. “Look,” she said. “Someone has left a gift for you.”

  She handed me the bow. Then she put the man’s pouch back into his tunic and turned him over, so that he lay as we had found him.

  All I could think of was that I held the bow that had killed Eramet. I handed it back to Maara.

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  She frowned at me, but she didn’t ask me why. She took the bow and wrapped it carefully in its leather cover. Then we started for home.

  We weren’t in the habit of talking on the trail. Maara walked ahead of me, because she was armed and I was not. When we were within a few miles of home, she stopped and made a fire. We had found a rabbit in one of our snares early that morning. She spitted the meat and set it over the fire. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at me.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “Vintel killed that man.”

  “Yes, I believe she did.”

  “Should we tell someone?”

  “Is there someone you want to tell?”

  I thought about it. “We ought to tell the Lady.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she sent those men home under safe conduct.”

  Maara nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “The Lady should know.” She turned the meat on the spit. “What about Sparrow?”

  “Do you think I should tell Sparrow?”

  “I want to know if you think you should tell her.”

  “No,” I said.

  Maara looked surprised.

  “Sparrow owes her loyalty to Vintel,” I said. “If I told her what we found, it would put her in a difficult position. She’d have to tell Vintel about it, and then Vintel would know that we know what she did.”

  “Why would Sparrow tell her?”

  “If someone told me something like that about you and I kept it to myself, wouldn’t that be disloyal?”

  She nodded. “It would, but it might be something you should know. What if the person who told you had only your well-being in mind?”

  Maara understood my dilemma.

  “I’ve already made that decision once,” I said. “I never told Sparrow what Vintel did to you. Sparrow had no other choice but to bind herself to Vintel. I couldn’t tell her something that would cause her to think ill of her warrior.”

  Maara thought that over for a minute.

  “That was well done,” she said.

  Her praise surprised me. Before I could think of a reply, she said, “It’s possible that Vintel told Sparrow she killed that man.”

  “Why would she tell anyone?”

  “Eramet belonged to Sparrow too.”

  “Sparrow didn’t want him dead. She told me so.”

  “Would she have said that to Vintel?”

  Probably not. I shook my head.

  “Do you think that what Vintel did was wrong?” Maara asked me.

  “Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “Vintel took wh
at she believed she had a right to.”

  “She should have claimed her right before the Lady and the council.”

  Maara gazed into the fire. “Among my people no one, not even a council of the elders, would ask someone to give up her right to take blood for blood.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because grief demands it.”

  She took a piece of meat from the spit and handed it to me. The memory of the dead man’s body had stayed with me all afternoon and I didn’t have much of an appetite, but I accepted what she gave me.

  “Would you have done what Vintel did?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  It was not the answer I expected. I waited for her to explain. Instead she began to eat. She motioned to me to do the same, and while we ate, she watched me, as if she could see my thoughts. When we had finished our meal, she said, “Has anyone ever taken someone from you?”

  I shook my head. I was about to ask her the same thing when I remembered that she had lost her family, her entire clan when she was just a child. I wondered if she remembered them, if she remembered losing them.

  “Will you tell me how you lost your family?”

  She shrugged.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  Her eyes searched for something far away, as she looked back through time.

  “Running feet,” she said.

  “Running feet?”

  “And the noise. The outcry and the crackle of fire. I was choking on the smoke. When I ran outdoors, I saw torches lying on the thatch. People were running all around me. Someone ran into me and knocked me down. All I could see was running feet.” Her eyes came back to my face. “People were shouting, calling to their families, to their children. I listened for my mother’s voice but never heard it. A man, a stranger, grabbed me by the hair and put me over his shoulder. I bit him, and he hit me.”

  I waited, but she said no more.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “That’s all.”

  “What happened to you? What did the man do with you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Who took care of you?”