Chapter Fifty: Warrior

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“They say you are much improved...” 

I startled violently, nearly dropping the garments in my hand. I was folding clothes in the back of my wagon when the words caught my ear. 

“...though you spend all your time alone.”

Like a doe startled in the woods, I froze. My pulse roared so I could barely hear the muffled footsteps drawing near. With my wounds mostly healed and my limp growing faint, I’d been moved to my own wagon and deemed fit to wed. It had been barely two weeks, and already I’d begun packing my few belongings for my departure to the king’s train. Rising gently over the eager singing of lately migrated birds, his voice was the last sound I expected to ever again find its way through my open door. I hadn’t even heard him mount the stairs. Now his shadow moved across the floor as his towering form filled the doorway.

“Come—come in,” I stammered, and the door swung closed behind him. I’d seen only glimpses of him since the battle, but we’d not spoken since. That day. How I cursed that day. 

He seldom came to court. I heard it said he came in from the Marches days before, but I caught not a whisper of him until he chose to startle me just now. Breathing deliberately, like drawing a bellows, I closed my eyes and tested my feet before turning around slowly and running my eyes up the length of him. He was sound and fit, I was relieved to find, though he had cropped his hair and beard again. Would it be unreasonable to ask why he’d waited so long? But I suppose I knew the answer already. His eye darted away as I tried to join our glances. 

“It’s all right. My solitude is a blessing,” I said defiantly. “You know me, I enjoy the company of so few….”

“Aren’t you lonely?” he asked, his brows drawing together in their painful, worried way.

Men liked to think of themselves as lone wolves, independent and fierce. But in the end, none of them can truly bear isolation—neither from their pack nor the comfort of women. I missed him, and there was no cure for that. But I liked being alone. It was all I’d ever really known. 

“Not lonely; solitary.”  

“There is a difference?” he asked, looking puzzled.

“Loneliness is when the world abandons us. Solitude is when we abandon the world. Solitude is the only liberty left to me.”

He nodded but looked unconvinced. “You don’t seek even the comfort of kin?”

“It’s because of my kin that I’m here,” I said, gesturing to the walls. Then added a little too hopefully: “But if you would stay, there is so much—”

His mouth twitched, “I—” then he shook his head, and his voice fell to almost a whisper, “you know I cannot. I came to wish you well,” he mumbled, looking at his feet. “And to give you this—” From deep within his caftan, he produced a fold of raw crimson silk no bigger than the palm of his hand. He passed it to me. It was weighty for its size. 

I peeled away the fabric like the petals of a rose blossom opening to the gaze of day, revealing hints of gold as it unfolded. Within lay a finely made golden chain, at the center of which hung a gold plaque nearly the size of my palm. Wrought of intricate openwork, it depicted a vast flowering tree that gave shelter to a multitude of tiny birds. Beneath the tree were tethered two horses, and a goryt was slung in its branches. A priestess sat beneath, her towering headdress entwined in the branches of the tree, and lying before her, as if asleep, was a warrior, his head cradled in his companion’s lap. I recognized it as the Tree of All Fruits. Aric often spoke of the Great Tree, its roots deep in the netherworld, its trunk in ours, and its branches rooted in heaven. 

The story was one I had come to know well from many nights around the hearth when tales were told by warriors setting off to face death each day. Known to all Skythai, it had also become one of my favorites. It told of a warrior, dying of battle wounds, faithfully brought by his blood-brother to the priestess, where she restored him to life. Here, the priestess wore trousers and carried a sword. That gave me a smile. 

My eyes welled up, and I could find no words. Where I had expected bitterness, he came bearing grace.

“I know how you despise gifts. But I would give you all I possess, for I can no longer number the things I owe—if I could even pay such a debt. I just had to—wanted to give you something,” he faltered.  

“It’s perfect.” It was hard to meet his eye again. 

Shuffling his feet, he wiped his palms on the thighs of his trousers and looked away.  

“It’s glorious, truly.”

“Then why do you frown?” he said with a weak attempt at a smile.

“Because I can never wear this openly.” 

He took the necklace from my hands and laid the cool, heavy pendant gently on my breast. “The most precious gifts are best enjoyed in secret,” he whispered in my ear as he fastened the clasp behind my neck. A shiver passed through me as his fingertips brushed against my skin. I wasn’t sure I could bear the weight of any more secrets. He swallowed hard as he pulled away and looked solemnly at me, taking my sweating hands in his for a brief moment. “If nothing else, I am a patient man. Time favors us.” He opened his mouth as if to speak more, but his hands went limp in mine, and I couldn’t hold onto him. Wooden and anxious, he turned clumsily and ducked through the wagon door into the searing daylight outside.  

The door swung between us, and there was no time to catch him or to call out, even if I dared. I stepped toward the door. Don’t, a voice within spoke out. Something restrained me, again. Something almost always did. Welling up inside me, a fount of all the things I wanted to say but didn’t know how. I wouldn’t see him again until the day of the ceremony, and it would be too late.

Now his gift. Even the fold of silk it came wrapped in smelled of him, so I stashed it away in a pouch that hung from my belt. Inside, I also kept the arrowhead from that day. Pulling it from the pouch, I held the narrow bit of bronze in my open hand and stared at it for a moment, turning it over against the flat of my palm. Such a small thing. I quickly tied up the pouch and tucked it away again. Then I laid the necklace inside my clothes—the heavy gold cool against my skin—and covered it. With my hand over my heart, I pressed upon the pendant, feeling the imprint of it deep in my flesh.

Father’s grand retinue had made the three-hundred-mile journey. The day he’d been planning for so long had finally arrived, and at least he would be pleased by today’s proceedings. This was, after all, my first purpose for coming to Skythia, and I suppose it was not unfair for father to hold to those expectations long after I had forsaken them. He’d arrived in high spirits, eager to see me, and perhaps a bit surprised that I’d survived my ordeal. As we sat to dine together, I told him stories of the Fields over our small feast and cups of wine. The pride in his eyes was almost unbearable as he spoke of my becoming a queen. As the daughter of a royal house, he said, my purpose was vital, for I would give birth to children that would bind our two kingdoms together in peace and perhaps become the future kings of Skythia.

But my heart turned leaden at the thought. Such are the consolations offered to ancillaries. So lavishly venerated for our power of generation, we gladly relinquish our claims to every other office. We serve on our backs while men serve on their feet. Perhaps I was alone in seeing mere adoration as meager compensation for no longer stretching a bowstring, sitting astride a galloping horse, or being welcomed among the council of warriors—for nevermore putting my own mind, heart, and hand to the fates of men, tribes, or kingdoms. But, odious though my purpose now seemed, the Bastarnai needed this covenant with the Skythai to hold, and I still bore a duty to see it through. 

In the long, chill hours before dawn, the panicked bellows and bleats of animals being gathered for sacrifice reached my ears from across the camp. Their dread mingled with my own. For a year, this union had been like a sword, its cold, hard edge against my throat. Now the day had finally come. With Eramandin, summer had begun, but the early morning was crisp, and the sun was nowhere in sight. Despite the chill, I sweated through my new dress.

Queen Opoea had insisted on sending her ladies to attend to me, as I had none yet of my own, and she must have suspected no good could come of me grooming myself for such an occasion. Royal servants came to my wagon in the grave hours before dawn and, by the light of a single tallow lamp and the weak flicker of the hearth, prepared my skin with a paste of cedar, frankincense, and cypress woods which were pounded in a mortar of rough stone and mixed with water. In silence, they rubbed my skin with the mixture and left it to dry. After an hour or so, the plaster began to crack and flake away as my new, clean self emerged like a ripe chick hatching from its egg or a tender sprout erupting from the seed. The remnants of this crust they scrubbed away with wisps of pasture sage and rough hemp cloths. Beneath, my skin looked fresh and smelled sweet. But I had never felt so used up and worn beyond my years. Listening as they ushered me into their somber sisterhood with the cold comforts of wifehood and motherhood’s sacred—if limited—duty, I drifted farther from them, unable to shake the notion that I was not finally embarking on a life, but ending one—the only one that had ever mattered to me. 

I stared unblinking as they carefully painted my eyes and sat listlessly as they plaited my hair, winding it up in a knot as married women wore. I didn’t even speak up when they cut a plaited lock from it, bound it with a single red thread, and lay it on the table for me to give to my betrothed. Instead, I marveled at how long it had grown. It had been a year since the evening Aric cut off my hair and sowed it in the earth, and yet within that year in the wilds, I’d lived a lifetime. I’d been warned, but now I understood: time truly moves differently in the realms of the gods. 

When all was done, they fixed a tall headdress and veil upon my head, and I stood motionless before them as they sprinkled me with mead. After the women departed, a sickly-sweet scent of perfume lingered—some mine, some theirs—that made me queasy. It reminded me of the overbearing smell of flowers at funerals; instead of making the death more tolerable, it made the flowers more perverse. 

I gazed at my image in my bronze mirror, the serpent mother’s tendril limbs clasped in my bloodless fingers as she held the reflective pool in her upraised hands, daring me to look. Perhaps it was this squeamishness about my own reflection that had kept me from delving into the mirror’s mantic secrets, which I had not yet learned to fathom. But in the faint light of the tallow lamp, I drew it up to my face and gazed deeply. There I saw new fine lines around my eyes where they had painted me like a courtesan. It was perfect. I could pretend I was someone else. This other woman would carry on in my stead—the old Anaiti left upon the altar. The flowers, perhaps, were for her. 

From beneath my pillow, I took up the necklace Aric had given me—the dying hero and the priestess—and wrapped it in a scrap of old felt. Without knowing when I might return to this wagon again, I stashed the necklace beneath a floorboard and laid the carpet neatly over it. Inside the bench on which I made my bed were stowed the other precious relics of that former life. Lifting the cushion, I raised the wooden plank to uncover my riding clothes, warbelt, a spiked sagaris, the sword Aric had given me at my initiation, and two unstrung bows in a goryt full of ready arrows—and an uncounted tally secreted at the bottom. Wrapped in a scrap of red silk lay the iron torc burnished smooth with constant wear. Neatly coiled within, my girdle of linden bast. Lifting it from the cache, I ran my fingers over its fine golden braids, thinking upon the day I first wore it and the oaths I swore to earn it. I had fallen far short of them in these last days, filled with grief over my sore misfortune.

Erman had warned me that until I’d been in the Wild Fields, I didn’t yet know what I was; what I truly loved or hated; what I’d kill or die for. He neglected to tell me that that knowledge didn’t make any of those things easier. But the forge of the Fields had hammered out a hardwearing heart—a vessel that could contain all the hurts and the healing, all the sorrows and the joys of this life without breaking. 

Would a warrior shrink now, and weep, and fall to grief? 

Perhaps I should have stayed behind the day the Geloni came, and this day would never have come to pass. But then, perhaps, the Siaposh warrior would have taken Aric’s scalp that cursed day had I not been there to take his. Despite what seers profess to know, we cannot see all ends, and even I have never pretended to know where men’s roads lead. I have only tried—and often failed—to steer the treacherous course between if and is. Had I succeeded, might I still ride the Marches today? Only the gods and shades now know. I am glad sometimes that I do not possess the two sights, for I should not like to know the answers to such futile questions. More than that, I am grateful that fate has determined I may live in a world where far greater sorrows have not come to pass. This world would be a sunless desolation in the absence of his warm smile, his keen mind, his kind eye, his brave heart. 

Fate decided one year ago this day, when two kings made a covenant, that this day must come. With the offenses of the battlefield still fresh in my thoughts, the indignities of the wifely bed could only pale in comparison. I had no right to weep. I knew what I had sworn and what the cost. Yet for a moment, wild and brief, we dared to cheat all their designs. Hope is like a draught of bitter-sweet haoma, swelling the breast with boldness and urging the flesh into battles it cannot possibly win. Even then, I think we knew, but we were already drunk. 

So I shall not protest. Only a fool grieves fate. If this union is the debt I owe for a life, so be it. I would not trade one breath of his for a thousand years under the open sky. I’d borne worse and would bear more still.

Whether I wore the insignias of the kara or the garments of court, I was hamazon, and the sharpest blade I bore was within my will. I might no longer dwell in the wilds, but the wilds dwelled forever in me. The roots of its stones tempered my bones. The chill of its streams turned my blood to wine. Storms raged over the plain only to break upon my brow and fall tamed at my feet. 

If ever I was worthy of the name warrior, what had I to fear? 

I replaced the girdle and closed up the cache of arms. Lifting the lock of hair from the table, I spoke a vow over the flames and cast it into the fire. Then, steadying my headdress, I ducked through the wagon door and into the cold morning.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read all or part of this original work of fiction. I hope you’ve enjoyed what you read, but even if you did not, your consideration is much appreciated.

The next volume in The Steppe Saga trilogy, The Gifts of Heaven, will begin posting early next year.

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