Chapter Twenty-Five: Arrow

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Aric thrust a cup of wine into my hands. “Drink,” he commanded, his voice hushed and harried, though we were safely inside our tent. Now the mask of fortitude had fallen away, and he grimaced in agony as he downed his cup and poured another.

Those first few sips of wine always did something strange to me, like a shiver emanating down my throat and into all my limbs. My pulse throbbed, and a light dew sprinkled my body as it was warmed by the liquid fire in my cup. All the hairs on my scalp tingled, and I felt as if I would melt into the earth like spring snow.

Aric wanted me to remove the arrowhead. I should have been flattered by his trust, but his request rattled me. As I considered the best course, I ground a paste of Apia’s tears and honey to apply to the wound. He’d left it too long, and the muscle was raw, inflamed, and beginning to bruise. It would be hard to extract the arrowhead now and doubly hard to heal. I was loath to cut more flesh, but I hoped that if I could grasp it with the arrow-pullers I’d been using on the horses, perhaps I wouldn’t need to. 

Before he allowed me to begin, Aric seemed desperate that I cut his hair as though there were no more urgent matters at hand. 

“You refuse to cut your hair or trim your beard before a fight?” I asked as I weighed his shears in my hand, testing their bite in my grip. “Yet now, after the battle is over…?” 

“A bull has his horns, a stag his antlers.”

“So?”

“So, too, a man in readiness for battle brings forth his attribute, drawing his strength from all creation. The great stag bears Arta’s gifts until after the season for fighting is passed, when he returns them to their origin. I swore to eradicate this Hellenic threat from the steppe. When a man makes a vow, he shall not cut his hair until it is fulfilled. It is consecrated in this way. And when his vow is finally achieved, he delivers his gifts to their source, as the deer sheds his antlers back into the earth. We sustain the Arta as it sustains us.”

“So, it is your horn?” Men’s minds really did work in strange ways.

“Why else does nature mark men thus?”

It was a fair enough question, and I could offer no reasonable explanation. I gently grasped a lock of his hair and drew a deep breath. He should not have asked something so onerous of me. There was no time for such things with his wound yet to heal. And what if I should deface him? Make him a laughingstock? I’d only ever cropped the manes of horses. I had no expertise in the grooming of men. But I could not afford to delay. Gripping the hair between my fingers, I held my breath, clenched my teeth, and snipped. Silky and fine, his wheaten hair smelled of dried sweat and leather as I combed my fingers through it and cut again and again until it bore some uniformity. Though I’d touched it only briefly, his fox-colored beard was as I remembered from the day we first fought: thick and unexpectedly soft. For the first time, I noticed several strands of grey hair coursing through it, which surprised me for one so young. This I cropped evenly to a finger’s breadth, working as swiftly as I dared, conscious ever of the arrow still festering in his wound. I believe I did a satisfactory job for my first try, and with his scruffy hairs neatened, he looked quite regal, though I tried to restrain the proud smile that sprang to my lips as I surveyed my handiwork. When I was through, he only ran his hands over all and nodded, never reaching for his mirror.

I gathered the clippings into a pile, which he snatched up and folded inside a scrap of hemp cloth. “They must be returned to the earth,” he said, “where they will once again become the grasses of the plain.” He looked meaningfully at me for a long while, and I realized finally that, without asking, he wished a favor of me.

“Of course, I... will bury them for you?” I said, still uncertain of what he asked. My people buried our nail clippings, though so seldom did we cut our hair that I’d never had the need. But I had my answer when his face lightened. He smiled gently in thanks, nodding and handing me the sack of clippings. 

“Turn around so I can apply this paste to your wound.”

He removed his tunic and lay face-down on his bed while I daubed the wound with the paste of dried poppy sap, reserving the rest to feed him after the surgery.

“So, before a battle, you grow your beards,” I asked as I prepared the rest of the things I’d need: arrow-pullers, water, bandages. “Afterwards, are you not weakened by the cutting?”

“It is how we renew our strength. We draw our vitality from the elements. But this diminishes our world little by little. After the battle, we must sacrifice and replenish the great reservoir. To restore the world and renew its vitality. A man can only take so much without also giving.”

“Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.”

With a clean fingertip, I probed the wound until I felt the ferrule of the arrowhead. He held his breath. The muscle had wrapped tightly around the arrow. I slid the slender blade of a knife alongside my finger to open the wound, then inserted the tip of the arrow-pullers, which were as narrow blacksmiths tongs with spoonlike shields over the jaws to aid in the extraction of barbed arrowheads. Getting a firm grip with both hands, I squeezed the arms as hard as I could. I’d not let the arrowhead slip away a second time. I braced both my knees against his flank. Aric, for his part, lay deathly still. His body was tensed, and he inhaled slowly and steadily despite what had to be terrible pain. 

Gripping with all my might, I heaved, and the arrowhead slipped free with the sickening moist sound of raw meat being sliced.

“I have it!” I washed it in the bloody basin of water I had used to wash the wound and examined it. The barb was bent but intact; the wound was clean. “Are you all right?”

“Better now,” he said with a groan and several deep breaths.   

I placed the arrowhead in his palm. “You should heal now. Likely it will abscess and ooze with foulness for many days. I will bandage but not stitch it.”

“Do what you must,” he said, “but my blood is upon this; I must first salve it.” He held forth the arrowhead in his open palm.

That an object might become so intimately entwined with a man’s being as to continue to affect him even at a distance seemed both odd and obvious. “Of course,” I said, passing him the ointment. 

Working the grease into the three faces of the bronze, he tucked the arrowhead carefully into a leather pouch and paused to look up and me. “Thank you.”

“It’s I who must thank you.” Once again, I removed the gold rings from my arms and held them forth. 

“Keep them. It’s my honor.” 

“Please, I will not take without also giving.”

“Let us not keep tallies between us, you and I?”

After I tied the last bandage, he eased himself gently down onto his pallet, relief chasing the pained expression from his face as he wrapped his arm around the fleece he used as a pillow. “Now that you’ve fought your first real battle, I think it’s time you had a stronger bow. I have just the one…” he mumbled as his eyelid drooped and, with a sigh, drifted off to sleep.

Sleep should have come easily. We were exhausted beyond the limits of the flesh. But the silence of the tent was cruel. With nothing to divert my attention, my mind turned inward. And all that waited there was doubt. Over and over in my thoughts, I lived each conscious moment again, re-ran each step, re-aimed each arrow. What little I was lucid for was enough for a lifetime—each stride, each draw, each scream, each wound. I fought it over anew a thousand times. 

Mostly, it was the screams of the horses that plagued me now. There is no more heartrending sound on earth as the cry of a horse in anguish. It haunted me far more than the cries of the settlers. As did the panicked expression of fear and betrayal in their eyes when they realize they’ve been led to slaughter. The immediacy of dispatching them with my own hand. In the clamor after the battle, the kindest thing was to quickly end their suffering, but now, in the quiet of the tent, their distress was constantly in my thoughts, played out vividly before my mind’s eye. 

Men know what battle is and who it serves. They understand what weapons are and what they do to flesh. But horses do not fight for gods, kings, or glory. They care nothing about our boundaries nor our honor. They fight because we ask them to. But that’s a lie. We don’t even ask. They want no part in our wars; they share none of our enmities beyond the loyalty a friend shows another in his time of need. Too often, we sacrifice these, our loyal friends, without even a passing thought. They were just left on the field where they fell—or the fresh ones were butchered for meat. I refused to eat it.

If only I had the power to keep my wits instead of drifting off when they needed me most. When they all needed me. Returning to court with the funerary wagons laden with the bodies of the dead—four of the novices and the old karik Tokhak—I would soon face those questioning eyes. Why you? Why has my son not returned, but you are still here? Aric would also be dead now if the bloody settler had been a better bowman. Why not me?

The men drenched themselves in wine and retreated to the cannabis tents to be cleansed of their cares and fears. I didn’t blame them. But I didn’t join them either. Too much was beyond my control; I wanted to keep my wits about me. I lay uncomfortably on a lumpy pallet, staring into the dark, unable to rein in my mind and sleep. Antisthenes snored deeply—likely still drunk—but, though he was still, I knew Aric was not asleep either. Was even a warrior like him plagued by such thoughts?  

After rousing himself for the evening meal, he’d shambled through the tent flap just as the fire died out, and I prepared for bed. His clothes and hair smelled of cannabis smoke, and his eye was red. But his expression was serene as he kicked off his boots and dropped gingerly onto his bed without undressing, laying on his uninjured side. We lay in solemn silence, willing sleep to arrive, like hosts who sit in expectation of a late guest making a long, arduous journey. Across the sword between us, he reached and placed his hand on my forearm.  

“I know,” he said in a tight rasp. 

With that, the dam weakened against the flood of emotions. My whole form began to shake as I stifled my sobs, warmed by his solace, braced by the strength in his fingers. 

What did he know? Did he know how the horrors I’d seen still flashed before my eyes no matter how many times I blinked them away? How the screams of the suffering horses still raked through my head? That I didn’t even know the names of the four young novices who died? That, though I tried to summon pity, I felt nothing for the man who strayed into the path of my arrow—except perhaps resentment that his foolish arrogance nearly caused my leaving. I couldn’t tell these things to Aric. These were not things people said aloud. What if, like all the rest, he should think me a monster after all?

Was there pain or anguish there as well? I longed to ask. To nestle close and comfort—be comforted by—him. But how many rules could I break in a day? Searching instead across the impenetrable black for a glimpse of his face, I found nothing.  

“Does it ever end?” I asked timidly of the darkness, afraid of the answer.

“There’s only time,” he whispered bitterly.

It wasn’t an answer. Time. Did that mean never? Was that the source of the turmoil that roiled beneath his still surface? Why he kept to himself and drowned himself in drink sometimes? After all he had seen and done and suffered, he possessed a knowledge beyond ordinary human endurance. And there could be no way to gaze upon it—stare it in the face—and remain human. How did he endure?

At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to hold him—and to be held. He had to want that, too. And the distance imposed by our oaths only added to the ache because we lay so close, yet across an unnavigable sea where there could be no passage. 

“What am I to do?” I asked. “Make my heart a stone, cold and hard?”

“Some do.” He paused a moment. “Others forge their hearts in iron.”

“Iron is just as cold and hard as stone.”

“It might seem so. But think of a sword and how it’s made. Stone is strong, but it can weather or be chipped away. Iron is bled from the ore by fire. Fire makes the iron change form and become something new. As we may, by the grace of Tabiti. We burn, we are hammered, we bend, we change. It hurts, but finally, we’re tempered and take our form, stronger, sharper, more enduring than before. A warrior’s iron is made to be resilient, not rigid. So long as it doesn’t fear the fire and the forge.”

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Chapter Twenty-Six: Priestess

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