The Midnight Circus, стр. 41
Shedid not turn to look again.
Tobecome a warrior, forget the past.
Threeyears she worked as a serving lad in a fortress not unlike her own butmany days’ travel away. She learned to clean and to carry, she learnedto work after a night of little sleep. Her arms and legs grew strong.Three years she worked as the cook’s boy. She learned to prepare geeseand rabbit and bear for the pot, and learned which parts were salty,which sweet. She could tell good mushrooms from bad and which greensmight make the toughest meat palatable.
Andthen she knew she could no longer disguise the fact that she was agirl, for her body had begun to change in ways that would give heraway. So she left the fortress, starting east once more, taking onlyher knife and a long loop of rope, which she wound around her waistseven times.
Shewas many days hungry, many days cold, but she did not turn back. Fearis a great incentive.
Shetaught herself to throw the knife and hit what she aimed at. Hunger isa great teacher.
Sheclimbed trees when she found them in order to sleep safe at night. Therope made such passages easier.
Shewas so long by herself, she almost forgot how to speak. But she neverforgot how to sing. In her dreams she sang to her father on thebattlefield. Her songs made him live again. Awake she knew the truthwas otherwise. He was dead. The worms had taken him. His spirit waswith the goddess, drinking milk from her great pap, milk that tastedlike honey wine.
Shedid not dream of her mother or of her sisters or of any of the women inher father’s fortress. If they died, it had been with little honor. Ifthey still lived, it was with less.
Soshe came at last to a huge forest with oaks thick as a goddess’s waist.Over all was a green canopy of leaves that scarcely let in the sun.Here were many streams, rivulets that ran cold and clear, torrentsthat crashed against rocks, and pools that were full of silver troutwhose meat was sweet. She taught herself to fish and to swim, and itwould be hard to say which gave her the greater pleasure. Here, too,were nests of birds, and that meant eggs. Ferns curled and then opened,and she knew how to steam them using a basket made of willow strips andstart a fire from rubbing sticks against one another. She followed beesto their hives, squirrels to their hidden nuts, ducks to their wateredbeds.
Shegrew strong, and brown, and—though she did not know it—very beautiful.
Beautyis a danger, to women as well as to men. To warriors, most of all. Itsteers them away from the path of killing. It softens the soul.
Whenyou are in a tree, be a tree.
Shewas three years alone in the forest and grew to trust the sky, theearth, the river, the trees, the way she trusted her knife. They didnot lie to her. They did not kill wantonly. They gave her shelter,food, courage. She did not remember her father except as some sort ofwarrior god, with staring eyes, looking as she had seen him last. Shedid not remember her mother or sisters or aunts at all.
Ithad been so long since she had spoken to anyone, it was as if she couldnot speak at all. She knew words: they were in her head, but not in hermouth, on her tongue, in her throat. Instead she made the sounds sheheard every day—the grunt of boar, the whistle of duck, the trilling ofthrush, the settled cooing of the wood pigeon on its nest.
Ifanyone had asked her if she was content, she would have nodded.
Content.
Nothappy. Not satisfied. Not done with her life’s work.
Content.
Andthen one early evening a new sound entered her domain. A drumming onthe ground, from many miles away. A strange halloing, thin, insistent,whining. The voices of some new animal, packed like wolves, singing outtogether.
Shetrembled. She did not know why. She did not remember why. But to besafe from the thing that made her tremble, she climbed a tree, thegreat oak that was in the very center of her world.
Sheused the rope ladder she had made, and pulled the ladder up after. Thenshe shrank back against the trunk of the tree to wait. She tried to bethe brown of the bark, the green of the leaves, and in this she almostsucceeded.
Itwas in the first soft moments of dark, with the woods outlined in muzzyblack, that the pack ran yapping, howling, belling into the clearingaround the oak.
Inthat instant she remembered dogs.
Therewere twenty of them, some large, lanky grays; some stumpy browns withlong muzzles; some stiff-legged spotted with pushed-in noses; somethick-coated; some smooth. Her father, the god of war, had had such amotley pack. He had hunted boar and stag and hare with such. They hadfound him bear and fox and wolf with ease.
Still,she did not know why the dog pack was here, circling her tree. Theirjaws were raised so that she could see their iron teeth, could hear thetolling of her death with their long tongues.
Sheused the single word she could remember. She said it with greatauthority, with trembling.
“Avaunt!”
Atthe sound of her voice, the animals all sat down on their haunches tostare up at her, their own tongues silenced. Except for one, a ratterrier, small and springy and unable to be still. He raced back up thepath toward the west like some small spy going to report to his master.
Lovecomes like a thief, stealing the heart’s gold away.
Itwas in the deeper dark that the dogs’ master came, with his men behindhim, their horses’ hooves thrumming the forest paths. They trampled thegrass, the foxglove’s pink bells and the purple florets of self-heal,the winecolored burdock flowers and the sprays of yellow goldenrodequally under the horses’ heavy feet. The woods were wounded by theirpassage. The grass did not spring back nor the flowers raise up again.
Sheheard them