WHEN WOMEN WERE WARRIORS
BOOK III
A HERO’S TALE
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Also by Catherine M. Wilson:
When Women Were Warriors Book I
The Warrior’s Path
&
When Women Were Warriors Book II
A Journey of the Heart
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WHEN WOMEN WERE WARRIORS
BOOK III
A HERO’S TALE
by
Catherine M. Wilson
~~~~~~~~~
Published by Shield Maiden Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2008 by Catherine M. Wilson
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
All characters depicted herein are the product of the author’s imagination and do not represent any actual persons, living or dead.
This book is available in print from Amazon.com and other online retailers.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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For my mother
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Acknowledgements
Many people offered advice, support, and encouragement during the “quite some time” it took to finish this project.
It is an extraordinary piece of luck for a writer to find someone who is willing to discuss a work in progress, someone who can enter the world of the story and gossip about the characters as if they were real people, who will question their motivations, scrutinize their actions, complain when they step out of character, and cast a light on a side of them their creator may have missed — someone who will take the work as seriously as the author does. For me that person is my friend and editor, Donna Trifilo, who, in addition to all of the above, pushed me through the hard times.
To everyone who was willing to read a work in progress, sometimes more than once, I offer my gratitude and the assurance that everything they had to say about it mattered.
Susan Strouse helped me overcome a major stumbling block at a crucial turning point. Lisa Liel, whose enthusiasm for the story rekindled my own enthusiasm, showed me how I could take a good idea and make it better. Ann Thryft’s considerable knowledge of the time, place, and culture deepened my own understanding of the story and its characters. Jo Trifilo’s insightful comments and careful critique gave me a new perspective on the story.
In ways too numerous to mention, significant contributions were also made by Jen Davis-Kay, Katherine Gilmartin, Rebecca Hall, Rob Field, Carmen Carter, Kate Maynard, the late Dr. Susan Barnes, Judi Miller, Jack Contento, Ru Emerson, the members of my first writers’ group—Morgan Van Dyke, Barbara Murray, Cooper Gallegos, Sandralee Watters, Marlene Michaelson, Rebecca Morn, and Eileen Thompson—who suffered through my early attempts to get my story started, and Heather Rose Jones, who helped me find my characters’ names.
And many thanks to George Derby and Marissa Holm for keeping me well fed.
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CONTENTS
63 A VISIT
64 THE FOREST PEOPLE
65 THE HUNT
66 MEN AND WOMEN
67 A HUNTER OF THE FOREST PEOPLE
68 THE FOREST AT MIDWINTER
69 A BARGAIN
70 GOING HOME
71 TURNING POINT
72 SACRIFICE
73 THE MIST
74 THE HOUSE OF KINDNESS
75 ELEN’S HOUSE
76 THE ARMORER
77 THIEF!
78 LOVE
79 THE ABYSS
80 FREEDOM
81 DISENCHANTED
82 BATTLEFIELD
83 BEST LAID PLANS
84 THE NORTHERN CHIEFTAINS
85 ELEN
86 REUNION
87 A HERO’S TALE
88 THE KING
89 THE DEAD
90 REASONS
91 BATTLE
92 EXCUSES
92 YOU AND WHAT ARMY?
94 VICTORY
95 A VERY LONG STORY
96 HOME
97 THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS
98 A TIME OF PEACE
99 THE DANCE
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63. A VISIT
Maara’s voice intruded on my dreams. I heard her mumble something about visitors.
“Wake up,” she whispered into my ear. “Don’t show surprise or fear. Treat them as you would treat a guest at home.”
I opened my eyes and looked up at her. While she waited for me to understand, she held me firmly against her side, to keep me still. When she saw that I was awake and in control of myself, she let go of me and sat up.
By the pale light that sifted in through the cracks in the tree trunk, I made out the figures of half a dozen people sitting only a few feet away from us across the fire. They were dressed in furs from head to foot and were so small I thought they must be children until I saw their faces.
“Don’t stare,” said Maara.
She uncovered a few coals that still glowed under the ashes and fed them twigs and kindling. Soon she had a bright fire burning.
All the while our visitors watched us in silence. I couldn’t keep from glancing at them out of the corner of my eye.
At last I whispered to Maara, “Who are they?”
“The forest people,” she said.
“The old ones?”
She nodded. “Hand me the water skin.”
When I sat up, I was aware of my nakedness. After I handed Maara the water skin, I looked around for my shirt, only to discover that several of the forest people were sitting on our clothing. Maara was naked too and didn’t seem concerned about it, so I resisted the urge to cover myself. Maara filled our copper pot with water and set it to boil.
One of the forest people spoke. Her words were incomprehensible to me, but her voice was lovely, melodious and sweet. She spoke only a few words, then gazed at Maara, as if she expected an answer. Maara stared back at the woman, on her face an expression of delight. I was about to ask her if she had understood, when she spoke two or three words in the same incomprehensible tongue.
There was a moment of silence. Then all the forest people spoke at once, until the woman who had spoken first made them be quiet. She turned back to Maara and began to speak again. This time she made quite a long speech, and I took the opportunity to observe her more closely. She appeared to be the oldest person there. Her wrinkled face was dark. Wisps of black hair streaked with grey escaped from under a white fur hood that covered her head and shoulders. She wore fur leggings under a long skirt of deerskin and a cape of rabbit fur around her shoulders.
When she finished speaking, I whispered to Maara, “Did you understand what she said?”
“Some of it,” she replied.
Maara thought for a little while before making her reply. Although she spoke awkwardly, the woman nodded that she understood.
Steam began to rise from the pot of water. I assumed that Maara had intended to make some tea. While I rummaged through our things looking for my package of herbs, I listened to the halting conversation. When I heard Maara speak her name, then my own, I looked up.
“Aamah,” the woman said, and pointed to herself. She named the others too, but I couldn’t keep the strange sounds in my head.
I took the pot of water from the fire and crumbled into it some chamomile. The fragrance of the flowers rose into the air. The forest people seemed to find it pleasant. When the tea had steeped for a few minutes, Maara offered it, first to Aamah, then to the others.
“Hand me the oat flour,” said Maara.
“How much?” I asked her. We had very little left.
“All of it,” she said.
With the last of our oat flour, Maara made oat cakes. While we ate, the forest people spoke softly among themselves. All of them were beardless, and I listened closely, trying to discover which were women and which were men, but they all had the same high, sweet voices. Soon my curiosity was satisfied. The heat of the fire and the crowd of people inside the tree made it uncomfortably warm, and the forest people threw off some of their clothing. Only Aamah wore a garment I would have called a shirt, although it was made, not of cloth, but of deerskin. The rest were naked under their fur tunics. Two of them were men. One sat beside Aamah and appeared to be advising her. The other was no more than a boy. All of the forest people were thin, light-boned, with their ribs showing.
Their clothing was cleverly made. They didn’t have the ragged look of the men who had been prisoners in Merin’s house. I saw no weapons among them other than the knives at their belts. Some wore carved tokens of wood or bone. At first their faces all looked much the same to me, but as I looked longer I began to see how each one was unique.
When I compared them to Maara, I saw both similarities and differences. Maara was bigger than the forest people, taller and more strongly built. Their skin was darker than hers, and there was a difference around the eyes, but I saw in them the people she had come from.
There were enough oat cakes for everyone to eat their fill and still leave a few left over. Maara wrapped them in a cloth and handed them to Aamah, who fingered the cloth and smiled. I believe she valued the cloth more highly than the oat cakes.
The others were becoming restless, but Aamah gave no sign that she was ready to leave us. She reached across the fire and touched Maara’s cheek, turning Maara’s face first to one side, then the other. Then she coiled a lock of Maara’s hair around her finger. Maara submitted patiently to Aamah’s curiosity. When Aamah spoke to her again, it was both a question and a command.
Maara settled herself and took a deep breath before she began to speak. Her speech seemed a bit more fluent than before, though she often groped for words and made up for the ones she didn’t know with gestures. She spoke my name several times and pointed toward the south and east, where we had come from. Aamah asked an occasional question, but most of the time she was content to listen.
Something Maara said made the forest people giggle and whisper among themselves. Aamah hushed them with a sharp rebuke.
I couldn’t contain my curiosity.
“Why are they laughing?” I whispered.
“They say I speak as a child speaks,” Maara said.
“You were a child, when you spoke as they do.”
“Oh,” said Maara.
Again she spoke to Aamah, and I had an idea that she was telling her what I had said. Aamah nodded solemnly. Then she turned and spoke to the man who sat next to her. They conversed for several minutes, loudly enough for Maara to hear, although she pretended not to listen. At last they seemed to come to a decision. Aamah took a token, a piece of carved bone, from a pouch she carried on her belt and handed it to Maara. Then, as silently as they had come, the forest people left us. I turned to Maara, eager to learn what she and Aamah had talked about.
“She made us welcome,” Maara said.
“Then we can stay?”
She nodded.
“What did she say?” I asked her. “What did you say?”
“She told me a little about her people, and she asked me about mine, as if she might have known the people I came from. What concerned her most of all, though, was why we’re here.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her the truth.”
“You told her we were outlaws?”
“No,” she said. “I told her that you are heir to a powerful house and that your enemies tried to kill you.”
I would never have thought to put it like that. “That makes me sound like the hero of a story,” I said.
“You are.”
An icy finger touched the back of my neck. I was afraid to ask her what she meant. I thought about all the tales I’d heard of heroes. Were they once just ordinary people? Were they once just like me?
“Aamah agrees with me that no one from Elen’s house is likely to come here in wintertime,” Maara said. “Sometimes hunters will come, but the people of Elen’s house stay away from the forest this time of year.”
Again the icy finger touched me. “Why?”
“The forest frightens them. Old memories grow strong in wintertime.”
As soon as she put it into words, I recognized my own feeling about the forest. This place that had at first felt so unfamiliar, now seemed more like a forgotten memory of childhood. Fragments of old stories hung in the branches overhead and told themselves in the sound of rustling leaves. Echoes of ancient songs murmured in the music of falling water. Childhood fears haunted my dreams.
“In a day or two, we’ll return their visit,” said Maara.
I brought myself back into the present moment. “Where do they live?”
“Their winter camp isn’t far from where we were yesterday.”
“Is that how they knew we were here?”
Maara chuckled. “They knew we were here from the moment we set foot in the forest.”
“How many of them are there?”
“I have no idea.”
“Is Aamah their leader?”
“She’s their mother,” Maara said. “Aamah means mother.”
I took it to be a symbolic title rather than a literal one. Surely Aamah hadn’t given birth to all of them.
Maara gazed at the carved bone, Aamah’s gift, turning it over and over in her fingers. She frowned, as she watched the pieces of a puzzle fall together in her mind.
“I once thought Aamah was my mother’s name,” she said.
I wondered then if childhood memories were haunting Maara too.
“Was your mother one of the forest people?”
Maara shook her head. “We lived in a village. We were farmers.”
“You speak the same language.”
“Similar, but not the same.”
“But you understood Aamah, and you made yourself understood.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “I don’t know how I remembered so much of the old speech. I haven’t spoken it or heard it spoken since I was a child.”
“You speak it to me sometimes,” I told her.
“I do?”
I nodded.
“I don’t remember.”
“You speak it when you’re troubled,” I said. “And when we make love.”
The memory struck us both at once. When our eyes met, I forgot all about the forest people. My body longed for her so intensely that I feared I might burst out of my own skin without her arms around me.
I held out my hand to her. “Come lie with me,” I said.
She didn’t hesitate. We lay down and let our bodies entwine themselves together. I closed my eyes and felt myself slip back into the darkness where I had found her the night before. Now if I opened my eyes there would be daylight and firelight. I had seen her so clearly in the dark. Would the light reveal or hide her? I opened my eyes.
I had forgotten how beautiful she was. My gaze fell first on her cheek, covered with the softest down. Her lips were slightly parted, as if they were waiting for a kiss. At the base of her throat, the blood beat beneath the tender skin.
The curve of her breast seduced my eyes. I laid my cheek against it. Its roundness fit perfectly against the palm of my hand. To my tongue her skin tasted sweet and salt together. I heard my kiss release her breath.
“Show me what pleases you,” I whispered.
“Your touch pleases me,” she said.
It was sweet to hear.
I leaned up on one elbow and smiled down at her. I couldn’t resist teasing her a little. “You leave me no choice but to discover the answer for myself.”
Maara tried not to smile. “Do you intend to spend all day in bed?”
“Is there anything we need to do today?”
“I suppose not,” she said. “Nothing that won’t wait.”
“Is there something else you would prefer to do?”
A little color came into her cheek. “No,” she said.
I could have spent half the day just looking at her. I was not unfamiliar with her body. I had so often bathed her, dressed her and undressed her. We had swum together in the river and sunbathed on the riverbank. While I had always thought her beautiful, I had never seen her quite like this. Before we were intimate with each other, her nakedness had been clothed in a veil of courtesy. Now my eyes had permission to enjoy her beauty. Not my eyes only, but my hands and my mouth admired her.
Her body was no longer shy with me. She welcomed each new touch. When her muscles tightened, they did so, not to protect her, but to express her pleasure. I still found a few tender places. I didn’t avoid them. I touched them with tenderness and with great care, to teach them not to be afraid.
I took my time with her, both for her pleasure and for my own. I delighted in discovering how best to please her. Sometimes I caught her watching me, smiling a mysterious smile, as if she had a secret she was about to share.
As her desire grew, she closed her eyes. When she raised one knee, I took it as a sign that she wanted a more intimate touch, but when my fingers lightly brushed the curls between her legs and caressed the inside of her thigh, I felt the first hint of resistance in her.
“What shall I do?” I whispered.
With a touch of her fingertips, she turned my face to hers. Her mouth invited my kiss. We kissed until my own desire almost overcame my resolve to wait for her. At last she turned me so that I lay beside her.
“Touch me,” she said.
As our knowledge of the world comes through the body, so too does the evidence of love. My heart’s longing flowed from my lips in words and kisses, flowed through my body as I held her and through my fingers as they caressed her. Her body accepted the pleasure I gave her, and it was pleasure that opened the way for love to enter.
She put her hand over mine, to hold me still.
“I don’t want this to end,” she said.
“It never will,” I told her.
And she slipped easily over the edge.
* * *
I woke late in the afternoon. Maara lay beside me sound asleep, one arm across my body, her breath warming my shoulder. The fire was almost out. Even under my heavy cloak, I was not quite warm enough, but I didn’t feel like moving. My body was peaceful with satisfied desire, and the gentle glow of joy filled my heart.
Twilight drifted in through the smoky air. While I waited for Maara to wake, I amused myself by looking for meaning in the patterns of light and shadow overhead, as one might look for meaning in the shapes of clouds. Fantastic figures emerged from the texture of the wood — here a goblin face, there the furry body of an animal.
The more I looked, the more I saw, and as I watched, the figures seemed to move, tumbling over and around each other, until they became one living tapestry. I saw, not whole figures, but bits and pieces, resolve themselves, then disappear — the clawed foot of a hunting cat, a fin, a fish’s scales, leaf shapes and flowers, a bird’s wing, squirrels’ tails. The tree itself was telling me a story, was telling me that everything that lives arises only for a moment out of a great sea of life before falling back into it again.
“Hush,” said Maara.
I opened my eyes.
Maara brushed the tears from my cheeks. “You were dreaming.”
The memory of my dream was still vivid, and as I told it to her, Maara grew thoughtful.
“Did the dream frighten you?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “It was beautiful.”
She smiled at me. “I think you must be one of us at heart.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, she looked up at the fading light and said, “We need to collect firewood before night falls.”
When I got up, I saw a large bundle, tied with a rope of twisted vines, set just inside the fissure in the tree trunk. The knot looked so complicated that I would have cut it, but Maara pulled at one loose strand and it came undone. She unfolded the entire hide of an elk, with the elk’s thick winter coat still on it. It was lined with soft deerskin, and another deerskin fell out of the bundle.
“The forest people have given us a proper bed,” said Maara.
She handed me our cloaks, laid the deerskin down in place of them, and spread the elk hide over it. Then I noticed a covered basket in the shadows by the doorway. When I took the cover off, I saw that it was filled with something that resembled coarsely ground grain. I handed it to Maara, and she tasted it.
“Acorn meal,” she said.
She held the basket out to me. I took a pinch of the meal and tried it. It was bland, with a faint nutty aftertaste.
“It makes a good mush,” said Maara. “Bread too. My mother used to make a dough of it, roll it into balls, and bake them in the ashes of the fire.”
“The forest people brought us gifts?”
Maara nodded. “When we make our visit, we’ll take them something.”
We had so little, I couldn’t think of anything we had that we could spare, but Maara seemed confident that we would find something worthy of the wealth they’d given us.
* * *
By the time we had gathered enough firewood for the night, it was almost dark. For supper we made a stew of venison and wild onions. Maara tried her hand at making acorn bread. She kneaded the dough and shaped the loaves as if she had done it all her life, and the bread turned out very well. We dipped it into the broth of the stew to soften the crust. It was delicious.
After supper Maara set me the task of braiding creepers into a stout cord for making snares, while she wove a fish trap out of hazel wands. As we worked, I thought about the forest people and wondered what they thought of us inhabiting their sacred tree. I hoped they didn’t see us as intruders.
“Do you think we’re really welcome here?” I asked Maara.
“Yes,” she replied. “I didn’t expect we would ever see the forest people. That they have befriended us is more than I could have hoped for.”
I remembered my anxiety for Maara and my fear that we would be discovered, and I surprised myself by questioning the forest people’s good intentions. Although I didn’t like to doubt them, I had to ask, “They won’t betray us, will they?”
“Betray us?”
“To Elen’s house.”
Maara shook her head. “The people of Elen’s house see the forest people so seldom that many doubt their existence, and Elen’s house has nothing they want. The forest people want only to be left alone, and the less Elen’s people are aware of them, the better.”
I was reassured, but her reply piqued my curiosity. “If they wouldn’t show themselves to Elen’s people, why did they show themselves to us?”
Maara gazed at me as if I should have understood.
“They showed themselves to you,” I said, “because you’re like them.”
With a slight nod of her head, she agreed with me. She continued to gaze at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. As I looked at her, her face changed, just a little, but enough to make me feel that I was looking at a stranger. For the first time she was not just Maara, not the unique person I knew, the person who was like no one else. She was of another tribe, another people, whose ways I didn’t know, who spoke a tongue I didn’t understand. I was the stranger here.
“What if they don’t accept me?”
“They will.”
Suddenly I felt very much alone, and my imagination began to run away with me. Was there a Vintel among the forest people?
Maara took my hand. “They will accept you now because you belong to me,” she said, “and soon enough they’ll accept you for yourself.”
* * *
Because we had slept so long that day, we sat up late. When we tired of our chores, we huddled close to the fire and talked a little. For Maara the smell of acorn bread must have opened a door into memory, because she began to tell me little things about her childhood home — about round houses with the fire in the center, bitter berries that left an aftertaste of honey, a man who used to play with her by hiding so that she could find him.
As I listened, I found it impossible to shake off the lonely feeling that came over me when I realized Maara had people here, while I had none. When there were just the two of us, I hadn’t felt lonely at all. Now, for no reason I understood, the presence of other people had put a distance between me and Maara. Maara felt it too.
“What’s wrong?” she asked me.
I shook my head. I couldn’t put my feelings into words.
“Are you afraid?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“Of the forest people?”
In a way I was, but not in the way she was thinking of. “I’m afraid you’ll belong more to them than to me.”
Maara smiled. “Don’t be silly.”
Her teasing only made me feel worse. A tear trickled down my cheek.
“You’re homesick,” she said.
She offered me no easy promises that I would see my home again or that I would someday feel at home in this strange place. She put her arms around me and let me weep against her shoulder for a while. Then, with a mother’s tenderness, she undressed me and put me into bed, where we lay awake for hours, sharing our memories of childhood.
64. THE FOREST PEOPLE
The next day we returned the visit of the forest people. We had stayed up so late the night before that we overslept a bit. While I made breakfast, Maara washed our dirty shirts, then hung them near the fire to dry. I knew without her saying so that they would be our gift to Aamah.
We followed the brook to the bathing rock and continued up the steep hillside. The forest canopy was thinner here, and a dense growth of holly and brambles grew beneath it. The only way through the tangle was a deer path that wound around the hilltop.
Maara, who was always so quiet, now began to make a great deal of noise. She scuffed her way through piles of brittle leaves and spoke to me out loud, careless of being overheard. Suddenly she stopped and spoke a word of greeting in the language of the forest people. I couldn’t imagine who she was speaking to. The woman’s clothing blended so perfectly into the colors of the forest that I didn’t see her until she moved. When she approached us, I recognized her as one of the women who had been our guest the day before.
The woman smiled and spoke a few words of welcome, then led us up the path a short distance before ducking through a curtain of vines into what appeared to be an impenetrable thicket. We would never have found our way through it without a guide. The faintest of paths led us over obstacles of deadfall and through briars that tugged at our clothing, until we arrived at a bramble wall so tangled that we could go no farther. Our guide grasped one of the stout canes and pulled, and the bramble wall began to move. The gate had been so cleverly concealed that I thought for a moment I was a witness to magic. We stepped through the gate into the winter encampment of the forest people.
The camp lay inside a large enclosure. On three sides we were surrounded by the bramble wall. On the fourth, the rocky hillside loomed over us, too steep to climb. All around us was evidence of much activity. A deer carcass hung from a scaffold, ready for butchering. Inside a long shed, built against the bramble wall and open on three sides, people were busy at their chores. In the center of the enclosure, several people were gathered around a fire pit. No one seemed surprised to see us.
Our guide led us to the fire and invited us to sit down. Someone offered Maara a tightly woven basket, black with soot. Maara dipped her fingers into it and drew out a sticky glob of porridge, which she ate with appropriate noises of appreciation. When they offered the basket to me, I did likewise.
We began to draw a crowd. Soon a score of women and men had joined us around the fire. Half a dozen children peered out at us from behind their elders, who were just as curious but less inclined to show it, although their quick glances took us in from head to toe. Maara greeted the forest people in their own language and repeated our names several times. Hers gave them no trouble, but their tongues tripped over mine until they settled on something that sounded like Tamara.
After a while, Maara asked for Aamah, and the forest people escorted us to the shed. Its roof was made of skins stretched over a pole framework and was so low that I could barely stand upright under it. Maara had to stoop to enter. The children laughed at her, and she laughed with them.
In a cozy corner, behind a wattle screen, a small fire was burning. Aamah sat beside it. Next to her sat the man who had been with her the day before. Aamah made us welcome at her fire, and the rest of the forest people settled themselves nearby. Again words of greeting were exchanged and food was offered. Aamah handed each of us a spit with strips of roasted meat skewered on it.
We were both full of porridge, but we ate enough to be polite. Then Maara offered our gift to Aamah, who accepted our woolen shirts with unconcealed delight, unfolding and admiring them before passing them along for the others to admire. The children touched them cautiously, as if they found the shirts mysterious and a little frightening. Their elders must have seen woven cloth before, although they seemed to have no means of making it themselves.
Maara spoke with Aamah for a little while, repeating enough of their conversation to me so that I could follow it. They spoke at length about the coming of winter. Over the last few days the weather had warmed a bit, but Aamah seemed to think that more snow was on the way. She also gave Maara some advice on where to set out our snares and fish traps.
When others joined in the conversation, Maara grew quiet, content to listen. I lost interest in listening to talk I couldn’t understand, and my eyes began to wander. There was a lot to look at. This was where the work of the community was done, where meat was smoked and hides were cured, where acorns were husked and soaked and ground into meal. Here reeds were woven into baskets and stone was worked for tools and weapons, but it was clear that no one slept here, nor would they find the open shed comfortable in bad weather. I saw no other shelter within the enclosure. Perhaps their sleeping quarters were as hidden as the village itself.
The man sitting beside Aamah began to speak. From the way he first settled himself and from his tone of voice, I knew he was about to tell a story. The children, who had been playing nearby, sat down to listen. Maara smiled in anticipation. Then, to my surprise, she moved behind me and pulled me back against her. The storyteller paused often to make noises and gestures to illustrate his tale, and Maara took each opportunity to whisper the story in my ear.
Honey Paw is very thin. Sleepy and bad-tempered, he blinks at the sun. The bees are hard at work among the flowers. Honey Paw follows them home. He satisfies his hunger, and the bees begin again.
Four Legs walks a great distance. Berries grow where only he can find them. Long Claw digs out the rotten hearts of trees and eats the grubs he finds there. Yellow Tooth gnaws on bones of elk and deer.
Fur Man is fat. His winter coat is thick. His great head grows heavy. He shelters in his cave and sleeps.
While I was trying to understand the meaning of the story, the children all began to shout at once, “Urti. Urti.”
“Bear,” Maara whispered in my ear.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s a riddle.”
But the storyteller hadn’t finished.
She-bear has lost her cub.
“He left the den too soon,” she says. “He wandered too far.”
Beside her hearth fire, she waits through the night for his return.
In the morning, she-bear goes out to find him. She looks in the forests, in the meadows, in the streams. She looks everywhere. She searches drifts of fallen leaves. She searches every cave and hollow tree. She searches everywhere.
She asks the squirrel, the beaver, the hunting cat, “Have you seen him?”
She asks the fish, the bird, the grasshopper, “Have you seen him?”
She asks everyone she meets. No one has seen him.
Night falls. In the branches of a tree, old mother Owl unfolds her wings.
“Old mother owl,” says she-bear, “where is my son?”
Old mother Owl takes wing. Silently she ascends into the sky, high over she-bear’s head. She-bear follows her with her eyes.
There in the sky, she-bear sees her son, on his back, lying in a field of stars. Then she knows that her son has met his death, and in her sorrow, she seeks her den and falls into the long sleep of grief.
Old mother Owl is sorry for she-bear’s sorrow. Old mother Owl flies to the body of she-bear’s son and plucks his spirit from his mouth. Old mother Owl flies to she-bear’s den and sends his spirit into his mother’s heart.
In the spring, she-bear wakes with her cub beside her.
The story filled me with sadness. A tear trickled down my cheek and drew Aamah’s eye. Aamah spoke to Maara, and Maara said, “She wants to know what made you cry.”
I had no ready answer. I shook my head. Maara answered for me.
“What did you say?” I asked her.
“I told her that your mother too has lost her cub,” she said.
Aamah smiled at me and spoke to me directly.
“She will send old mother Owl to your mother’s heart,” said Maara.
* * *
We left the village of the forest people so late in the afternoon that we didn’t arrive home until after dark. Neither of us was hungry. The forest people had fed us until we couldn’t take another bite. We huddled under our cloaks while we waited for our fire to warm the hollow tree.
Although my body was tired, my mind was wide awake, full of all the things I had seen and heard that day. I had spent the homeward journey thinking about the story of she-bear and her cub. I understood its meaning. It was a tale for teaching children about the bear stars.
As everyone knows, the bear travels in a circle in the northern sky, completing one circle in the course of the year. At summer’s end, the bear lies on his back, a sign that winter is coming. The story also taught something of the ways of bears.
When I was small, my mother told me animal stories to teach me about the world. Each story was the answer to a question. How did the bobcat lose her tail? How did the hare get his white winter coat?
I was a little disappointed.
“Is the story of she-bear only a tale for teaching children?” I asked Maara.
“If it were,” she said, “would it have made you cry?”
Then I remembered her reply to Aamah. The story of she-bear was also a story about motherhood.
“Are our mothers searching for us, do you think?”
“I hope not,” said Maara. “I hope they’re both safe at home, but I think their hearts must be searching for some news of us.”
As I drifted into sleep that night, I dreamed of old mother Owl. She flew into the heavens and touched the stars. She flew all night on silent wings. She heard the prayers of she-bear and answered them. She heard Aamah’s prayers and answered them. She heard the love in every mother’s heart and brought their children home to them.
* * *
The next day was cold and dark, and we had work to do before bad weather kept us at home. In the morning we followed the brook downstream, looking for a place to put our fish trap. On the way back, we set our snares. We spent all afternoon collecting firewood. It was fortunate we did, because that night, as Aamah had predicted, snow fell.
For the next few days we stayed snug and safe in our hollow tree. To pass the time, Maara repeated the story of she-bear, a few words at a time, first in the language of the forest people, then in my own tongue. I learned the strange words more easily than I thought I would. At least I learned to recognize the sound of them. Making many of those sounds myself was more than I could do. Maara tried not to laugh at me.
After our visit to their village, I had no more anxiety about the forest people. My experience there convinced me that they had kind hearts. None of them seemed to doubt our good intentions. I felt that they accepted us, not just as neighbors, but as friends. Even the children lost their fear of us. One little girl laid her head in my lap and fell asleep and neither knew nor cared that a few hours before I had been a stranger. Now I was ashamed that I’d had doubts about them, because most often it is the trusting who are trustworthy.
* * *
After the snowfall, the forest people came to visit us again. Nearly a dozen of them crowded into our hollow tree. I was disappointed to see that Aamah wasn’t with them. This time the man who usually stayed by Aamah’s side, the storyteller, whose name was Sett, appeared to be their leader. They had brought us a shoulder of venison, which we cooked and shared with them. While we waited for the meat, we offered our guests some tea and acorn bread.
Once we had eaten everyone relaxed and a general conversation began. I didn’t understand a word of it, but I found it soothing. It reminded me of when I was a child, listening to the grown-ups talk. Although I couldn’t always follow what they were saying, the threads of their conversation wove themselves together into a tight fabric around me, and if the sharp words of some tore it a little here and there, the mending threads of others drew us all together again. So the forest people’s talk surrounded me, until at last I drifted off to sleep leaning against Maara’s shoulder.
* * *
For several weeks, weather permitting, we exchanged visits with the forest people, and when we could, Maara and I returned their generosity. Even the gift of a few fish pleased them, although they could easily have caught all the fish they needed for themselves. While fish seemed to me a more practical gift, they greatly prized our woolen shirts, not for their usefulness, but for their novelty. Aamah had shared them out by tearing them to pieces, so that everyone could have a few strips of cloth. Some wore the strips tied around their wrists or ankles or as headbands, while others braided them into their hair.
I soon discovered why the forest people had no use for woolen clothing. Whenever we traveled to their village, brambles would tug my cloak from around my shoulders and tear holes in my heavy woolen trousers, scratching the skin underneath, while the forest people, in their fur tunics and deerskin trousers, glided through the thickets unhindered and unscathed.
I envied the forest people their sturdy clothing for its warmth as well. In stormy weather and at night, they retreated into a cave in the rocky hillside behind their camp, but they preferred living in the open. As long as daylight lasted, they sat around the central fire in the enclosure or, if snow was falling, around Aamah’s fire in the covered shed. While Maara and I were seldom warm enough, even wrapped up in our cloaks, they didn’t seem to mind the cold at all.
The forest people always had work of some kind to do, but they were never too busy to spend an afternoon with us sitting around the fire. They were fond of conversation and could spend hour after hour talking and telling stories. Although they never seemed to tire of hearing tales they must have heard a hundred times before, they took even more delight in hearing something new. They asked Maara endless questions about who we were and where we’d come from. Maara did her best to answer them. Her once halting speech became more fluent every day. Her tongue had not forgotten how to make the sounds of its first language, and what she didn’t know, the forest people were glad to teach her.
While they always treated me with courtesy and kindness, the forest people seldom spoke to me directly. If I failed to understand their gestures, they might speak to me through Maara, but for the most part they ignored me. In general conversation Maara tried to make me feel included by repeating some of what was said so that I could understand it, and she continued teaching me in private, as she had taught me the story of she-bear.
I began to listen closely to the forest people’s talk. As the days went by, I caught more and more words I understood. Sometimes I could put together for myself a little of their meaning. My ear was learning to attune itself to the strange sounds the forest people made, but my ear proved more clever than my tongue. Their simplest words felt awkward in my mouth, and I was too shy to try speaking to them.
Then one day Maara taught me to say a simple greeting. She made me repeat it endlessly, until my tongue had grown accustomed to it. When they heard me try to speak as they did, the forest people were delighted. They responded by telling me the names of everything they could find to point to and waiting for me to repeat the words after them. They were relentless. Maara finally had to rescue me. Later that afternoon, as we sat around their fire, I heard one of the women whisper something to Maara while tapping the side of her head in a gesture I understood. I didn’t need Maara to tell me that the forest people had thought me feeble-minded.
* * *
Because their lives were so different from my own, I listened fascinated to everything the forest people talked about. Most of all I loved their stories. Almost all of them started with a riddle. It was a clever way to capture the attention of the children, who were delighted with themselves when they shouted out the answer, although they must have heard each riddle many times. The stories themselves were simple. Each one taught a lesson about the world, about the ways of animals, about which plants were good to eat, which bore fruit, when and where to find them, and what could be learned about the weather and the seasons from the lives of plants and animals, and from the night sky.
As simple as they were, I found the stories strangely moving. Beneath the surface lay a meaning that touched my heart, although it took my head a while to find it. Almost without exception, the heroes of the stories were animals, yet all the strengths and foibles of humankind were there, in the fierceness of the badger and the wild pig’s stubborn pride, in the suspicious nature of the hunting cat and the mother-love of bears. All their favorite story characters wore a human face, like the squirrel whose scolding chatter brought back the memory of an ill-tempered woman who used to frighten me when I was small. It gave me a sense of satisfaction to laugh at the memory of that old woman’s silly squirrelish face, and I enjoyed even my own rueful laughter when a story showed me an unflattering image of myself.
* * *
One day when we were visiting the forest people, we overstayed our time. It had been a gloomy day, and before we knew it, dusk had fallen. Aamah insisted that we stay the night.
As the darkness grew, all the fires in the enclosure were put out. The forest people were careful to keep their presence hidden, even when no stranger could be near enough to see their firelight reflected off the cloudy sky.
For the first time, Maara and I entered the cave where the forest people slept. The cave mouth was well hidden. A fracture in the rock, so low and so narrow that we had to slip through it on our hands and knees, opened into a large cavern. Far above our heads I heard a distant moaning sound that might have been the wind echoing in the cavern’s rocky vault.
Inside the cave the air was still and smelled of damp. Someone made a fire, which drew in a draft of clean, cold air. A sudden gust sent showers of sparks upward into the dark. Around the fire pit, skins and furs covered the earthen floor. When we sat down, the forest people gave us robes to put around our shoulders while we waited for the fire’s warmth to take the chill out of the air.
No one spoke until Aamah crumbled a handful of dry leaves into the flames, making a thick smoke that smelled of cedar, and murmured words that ascended with the smoke to the ears of gods I didn’t know. Then, in voices soft enough not to echo, the forest people resumed their conversation.
After the children had been put to bed, the grown-ups sat around the fire for several hours more. For a time their talk was light-hearted. Then someone told a story, a tale darker than I’d heard from them before, about a hunter lost in a land of dreams. The story put them in a somber mood. After the story ended, there was an uneasy silence, as if the forest people knew that the time had come to speak of something disturbing.
Sett began by saying, “Where were they today?”
One of the men answered him, and others added to his story.
Although I caught a few words and phrases, I couldn’t quite follow their meaning, but their furrowed brows and worried voices told me that this conversation wasn’t for the ears of children.
“Is there trouble of some kind?” I whispered to Maara.
“There are strangers in the forest,” she replied.
“People from Elen’s house?”
“Perhaps.” She touched a finger to my lips to keep me quiet, so that she could listen.
Unlike Merin’s council of old women, who could spend all day talking about nothing, the forest people seemed to want to have their serious discussion over with as quickly as possible. Sett listened to what everyone had to say, then thought for a little while before speaking a few words to each one. Then the forest people rose and went to bed.
Maara and I followed their example and crept naked into the bed they offered us. The news of strangers worried me. I was full of questions, but before I could whisper even one of them, Maara put her arms around me. For a long time, being close to her was all I could think about. The love I felt for her made me feel strong, while her love for me made me feel safe. Soon I slept.
* * *
The children woke us. They must have been up long enough to grow impatient with waiting for their elders to wake up. I was reminded of the many mornings of my own childhood when I would play almost quietly enough not to wake the sleeping household.
The fire was out. The only light inside the cave came from a little daylight that found its way through fissures in the rock. Two ghostly figures all in white cavorted by the cave entrance. I rubbed my eyes. Then I saw that they were children. Each was wearing one of our shirts. I glanced around me, looking for the rest of our clothing. Every stitch was gone. One boy wore my trousers wrapped around his shoulders, while another wore Maara’s on his head, with the legs trailing along behind him like a train. Our tunics were nowhere to be seen.
We still had our cloaks. We had spread them out under us, to keep us from the cold floor. Our fur leggings lay where we had left them, and Maara found our boots, which the children had used to scoop cold ashes from the fire pit. We shook the ashes out and put them on, and wrapped our cloaks around our naked bodies. Then we joined the others, who were gathering around the fire.
No one scolded the children for taking our clothing or tried to take it from them to give back to us. One of the women found a couple of fur tunics for us to put on. Mine covered me fairly well, but Maara’s ended above her waist, so that she had to wear her cloak wrapped around her like a skirt.
We breakfasted inside the cave. When I went outdoors to relieve myself, I saw why the forest people hadn’t yet gone outside. A heavy snow was falling. The wind drove it under the hood of my cloak and down my neck, and it lay in drifts so deep that my knees above my leggings were soon blue with cold.
When I went back inside, Maara was standing naked, surrounded by the women, while the men watched and gave advice. Beside her lay a pile of furs and deerskins. One woman held a deerskin up to Maara’s waist, while another wrapped it around her thigh and marked it with a bit of charcoal.
All afternoon we stayed inside, while the women made Maara a complete suit of clothing. In only a few hours they had made her a pair of deerskin trousers, decorated with clay beads colored blue and black and baked hard in the fire. By the end of the day, they had made her a tunic of rabbit fur, greyish-brown in color, with bits of red squirrel worked in for decoration. I thought she looked quite splendid.
We stayed with the forest people for several days. By the time we left for home, both of us had new clothes — trousers of soft deerskin, leggings that covered our legs to above the knee, long-sleeved fur tunics, and fur caps with flaps that turned down over our ears. To replace our heavy boots they made us moccasins of elk hide lined with fur. We would have been satisfied with our own cloaks, but the forest people insisted on making us capes of deerskin, tanned with the hair on it to repel the rain and snow.
My new clothes felt strange to me at first. Instead of the scratchy wool that I was used to, the forest people’s clothing felt like a second skin, so much so that I could almost believe I wasn’t wearing clothes at all, except that I was warm. No cold air leaked in, even at the seams, and they were a delight to travel in. Bramble thickets let me pass. Falling snow caught in the fur of my cap as in an animal’s pelt and was easily shaken out before it melted and trickled down my neck. I felt like a creature of the forest as we made our way home, silent and invisible in animal guise.
65. THE HUNT
As much as I enjoyed the company of the forest people, I was glad to come home again to our hollow tree. I missed spending time alone with Maara, and for a week, while snow continued to fall, I had her undivided attention. Her conversations with the forest people had awakened memory, and she told me more stories of her childhood. She even spoke a little of her time in Elen’s house, although those memories were more painful. When we ran out of things to talk about, we lay in each other’s arms and let our bodies speak of love.
Sometimes I felt her thoughts stray from me, and I knew what she was thinking.
“You miss them,” I said to her one day, when I caught her gazing at the entrance of our hollow tree as if she awaited visitors.
She admitted that she did.
I surprised myself by saying, “I miss them too.”
Not only did I miss the forest people. I missed what I saw in Maara when we were with them. When she was the center of their attention, she seemed half pleased and half shy, as if having the attention of others was something new to her, which I suppose it was. I missed watching her in conversation and in banter too quick for me to follow. I missed seeing her unguarded, as I had never seen her in company before. I surprised myself again by suggesting that perhaps we should spend the winter in the village of the forest people.
Maara nodded, as if she had already thought of it.
“Would we be welcome?”
“Aamah has dropped a hint or two,” said Maara. “I think it would be wise. We endanger them whenever we travel back and forth.”
It was true. We risked being seen by strangers, and we had begun to wear a path between our home and theirs. Maara’s other reasons I let her keep to herself.
* * *
The next morning we took up our packs and left our hollow tree. I felt a bit nostalgic about leaving our cozy home. On an impulse, without Maara knowing, I left something of myself behind. I slipped one of my arrowheads from my pouch and left it in the crevice where I had found the offering of the forest people.
Not far from the forest people’s village we came upon the fresh tracks of a family of deer. Beside them were the pawprints of a wolf. Maara knelt to examine the tracks. At the same time, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something moving through the trees. When I turned my head to see what it was, there was nothing there. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.
Slowly, careful not to make a sound, Maara slipped her pack from her shoulders and set it down. Then she relieved me of mine. She made a sign to me to take out my bow and string it.
Another movement caught my eye. This time I thought I knew what it was, and all my childhood fears blew like a cold wind through my heart.
“Wolves,” I whispered to Maara.
“No,” she whispered back. “Men.”
My fear of wolves yielded to a fear of something yet more dangerous.
“Strangers?”
“No.”
Before I could say more, she put her finger to her lips and drew an arrow from my quiver. When I offered her the bow, she shook her head. She handed me the arrow, then fastened the quiver to my belt.
Maara gestured to me to stay close behind her, as she followed the tracks into the forest, moving with a stealthy gait that was faster than a walk, yet not quite a run. I imitated her as best I could, and for once I moved as quietly as she did. The moccasins cushioned my step. In my new clothing, I was as silent as an animal in its skin.
As we traveled farther from the brook, the trees closed in around us. The shade was so deep that even the snow-covered ground failed to lighten the gloom. What little light entered here hung in mist that baffled the eye.
On either side of us, others were moving through the trees. Their ghostly figures drifted at the edges of my vision. Whether they were wolves or men, I couldn’t tell. In the snow and mist, their coats of silver-grey disguised their form, but more than once I imagined I caught sight of a pricked ear, a snarl of teeth, a gleaming eye.
Maara stopped and crouched down beside a tree. Against the trunk, in her cap and tunic of mottled greys and browns, she was almost invisible. She motioned me down beside her.
Some distance ahead of us I heard the sounds of the hunt, of the pursued and the pursuers, running through the forest. Too late now for the deer, in peril of their lives, to stand silent in a thicket while the hunters passed them by. Too late now for the hunters to stalk their prey in silence, to take them unawares. Some of the hunters must have lain in ambush, because the deer had been turned back and now ran toward us.
Closer they came, and closer still. The sounds of their flight, muffled by the snow and mist, deceived my ears, making me believe they were farther from us than they were. A doe flew by us, so swiftly that I had no time to nock an arrow. Next, the stag rushed past, and this time I was ready. I loosed my arrow. At the same moment two more arrows flew. Mine sailed over the stag’s back, but the others found their mark. One struck the stag’s flank. The other found its way between the ribs, behind the shoulder.
The stag ran a few steps, then stopped and stood, stiff-legged, his tongue protruding from his mouth, his hot breath white as the mist, then red with his heart’s blood. Still he stood, defiant.