I thought horse thoughts. I dreamed horse dreams. They were all filled with grass and open sky and the steppes that stretched on forever, wild thoughts and dreams for which there were no words in our own language.
When I rode I was no different from the creature I rode upon. The wind was the same to both of us. The ground shuddered beneath us.
I was ready to ride into battle, but none of our people had her own horse until her thirteenth summer. That was the passage into the life of a warrior: the gift of a horse.
When my time came, I waited for the gift I was sure would come from my mother. I watched the Queen on her great gray mare whose name meant Pearl, just like the precious ring Alina wore on her right hand. But my mother still wouldn't look at me, not even when I brought her mare to her, brushed and shining like the inside of a shell from the farthest shore of the Black Sea.
I waited throughout my thirteenth summer. Astella waited with me, assuring me our Queen would know it was my time. Time to be a warrior and to ride my own mare. But the summer moved forward and there was nothing. Heat waves, hawks, clear white-hot skies. No sign of our Queen.
One evening when I was feeding the horses, Asteria rode up to meet her cousin. Now that Astella's face had been cleaved in two she looked like a reflection in the river, distorted and watery; her left eye was always filled with tears. She looked like a weakling while Asteria, with her shaven skull decorated with its fierce bear tattoo, seemed too ferocious to speak to. I stayed where I was, feeding the horses.
You're not crying over that stupid girl, are you? Asteria said to her cousin. Little Yellow Eyes.
It took me a while before I realized she meant me. I was the stupid one. A girl and nothing more. I looked down and saw my feet were coated with dust. I felt I was disappearing. No one could see me.
I'm not crying at all, Astella responded to her cousin. Of the two, she might have been the fiercer in battle, even though her hair was long and her face destroyed. She did not give up easily and her bravery was legend. It was said she pulled the enemy's axe out of her own flesh without once crying out loud.
What's fair is fair, Astella said. Rain is thirteen and it's time for her to have a horse of her own.
I'll tell the Queen. Asteria laughed. I was the one who fed and watered Asteria's horse. I was the one to calm her war-horse if a snake or a hawk passed by. I'm sure it's her main concern. She smirked. You can see how our Alina dotes on her daughter.
I understood. I was nothing to my mother. Sorrow and no more.
And then one day when I rose from sleep with thoughts of the black horse in my head, I heard something outside my tent. Right away I recognized the pure high voice of the one who would be my horse. I ran outside into the already-cold morning. Summer was leaving, but it was not too late. I was still thirteen.
I wished it had been my mother who had chosen my horse. I wished she had been the one to come to me with my gift. But there was Astella holding on to the training rope. She had been working with a wild mare secretly, all summer long.
The horse I was given was white, just as my great-grandmother's horse had been. She was too beautiful to be spoken to, so I called her to me by bowing and lowering my head the way I'd seen the wild horses do. I called my sister-horse our word for Sky, and like the sky, Astella said, she would always be changing. In winter, my mare would disappear in a world of snow, just what a warrior wanted, to be invisible to her enemy. In the summer, the yellow dust would rise up from the steppes and cling to Sky, and once again she would disappear in battle. Our enemy would not see my mare until she was upon them, with me on her back, my slingshot or bow aimed low at the scattering man-beasts.
There were some little children who were afraid of Astella now because of the way she looked, the deep wound that split her face to the bone. But I went to her and dropped to my knees; I swore my gratitude forevermore.
Stand up, Astella said. I am the one who is grateful. I vow my loyalty.
For an instant I felt that all things were possible.
That I was, indeed, a Queen.
All through my thirteenth year I practiced. I did not stop until I was the rider I imagined my great-grandmother must have been. I wanted to ride as she had, flying with my eyes closed, better than anyone. It was pride and something more: It was who I was.
In time I could stand on my horse's back and ride at full speed. I could turn around twice, then three times, then four. I could ride hidden from view, backward, so I could spy if there were enemies behind me. Other girls laughed and ran through the grass and swam in the river. As for me, I rode. Even when I was better than anyone else, it wasn't enough. I wanted to ride through clouds. I wanted to ride into dreams. I wanted to go faster than any woman ever had before, and if others envied me for that, so be it.
It was a man who actually helped me do what others could not, who gave me the gift that allowed me to surpass even Astella. He was the single man who lived among us, captured long ago, a smith who'd been made lame so he could not run away. They say that smiths are magicians and the things they make out of iron and bronze and fire are the work of the goddess, her blood and bone. Our man made bronze arrowheads and heavy scythes, the best we'd ever had. For my horse, he fashioned something special.
For the next Queen, he said to me in his broken language. Most of our people stayed away from the smith. He was ugly and his voice sounded like stones hitting together, but he didn't seem like a monster. Perhaps he was hoping for his freedom someday when he spoke kindly to me, waiting for the time when I would be Queen. Perhaps I'd grant it to him in exchange for his gift.
Our stirrups were flimsy, usually made out of horsehide, but the smith made mine of brass covered by hide. These were so strong they could hold my weight as if I were a feather or a single Made of grass. Because of them I could do what other riders could not. I rode with one foot in the stirrup, a part of my white mare, a cloud to her sky. I crouched beside my mare, close to one side. Then I stood and leapt over her back to the other side. I practiced for battle, when I would slip beneath Sky, riding under her belly with her like the sky over me, protecting me.
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, stre
aked 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 t
oo 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.