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After some time we approached a monstrous cliff, rising up like a great bear ahead of us. She drew me up next to her and embraced me, a thing she had never done. When she pulled away her craggy face was wet with tears.
“You have been my best student. I am proud of you. But I cannot go with you tonight. I hav
e never done this thing—it is not my right. It belongs only to you, and had there been any woman of your family left to bring you here, we would never have met. After tonight, if you come back to the village, it will be the end of your time with me. You will be a full well: enough silver water within you to return to your own people and ladle it out to them, to guide them, and teach them. The rest of your education will be the private learning women like us work for all our days, when you will become both teacher and student, mistress and apprentice. You will return pregnant with knowledge to bear to your tribe, and your power will grow like a child, and you will spend the rest of your life in labor. But you must pass this night first, and emerge again. Then you will be ready, my beautiful, beautiful daughter. My beautiful little goat.”
She smiled brightly, her lips curving like a scimitar, and pointed to a gaping hole in the cliff wall. I kissed her cheek awkwardly, looking into her shining eyes. I was determined not to show my fear, to possess it and enter it, to dwell within it until it disappeared into my calm, quiet belly. I turned away from Thurayya, from my life with her and my youth, and entered the mouth of the cave.
Soon I could see nothing; darkness like hands pressed in on me. I made a place for myself on the cool, compact earth, listening to the slow, lazy rustle of bats far overhead. And I waited, bounded in blackness.
KNIFE’S FACE WAS LIT BY THE REDDENING SUN, HER nose casting shadows on her scars, her eyes deep and impenetrable as snowy mountains. Well water glistened crimson and saffron in wooden buckets that lay scattered around the house like wildflowers, reflecting the blazing sky. The Prince rested on his heels, ran his hand through thick black hair, now marshy with sweat. He started, as if out of a spell, and looked sharply at the old witch.
“Well,” he blurted, “what happened then?”
The woman cackled huskily. “Then the pretty Prince came inside the hut, for it was becoming night, and kneaded dough for the terrible, ugly witch’s bread.”
This was nearly too much for the Prince, who had tried very hard to keep his dignity thus far. To now work in this deformity’s kitchen like a scullery maid? Leander of the Eight Kingdoms, the Two-Blooded Border-Lord, Son of Helia the Radiant, would absolutely not bake filthy, thin peasant’s bread in this wretched place. He had promised to serve her, yes, but he had meant to do so in some manly fashion which involved the slaying of some things and the rescuing of others. Bread needed to be neither slain nor rescued.
He opened his noble mouth to say so, but the chill stare of the witch stopped his words like a noose about his neck. Her teeth gleamed horribly bright under cracked lips, and seemed to lengthen and twist into clashing ivory knives. In a moment the vision had evaporated, but the Prince was now convinced that bread-baking was a most estimable and agreeable work, and that perhaps kneading was not too dissimilar to slaying.
Though he had to duck to enter the hut, it was more comfortable and spacious inside than he could have expected, a fire licking at gnarled hawthorn logs in one corner, bound books lining the walls. Knife turned as he removed his fine leather boots.
“Excuse the doorway. My people have always been small.”
Bundles of dried herbs and once-bright flowers hung like stalactites from racks on her ceiling; gray, red, brown. He saw withered peach blossoms, dusty lupines, roses and bundles of mushrooms like roses, angelica and buckbean and bladderwrack, coltsfoot, rue, and mallow—and there his knowledge of botany, with its princely limitations, failed him. Glinting black furs covered the floor like autumn leaves. Great terra-cotta jars and mystifying chests with copper and silver locks, innumerable walking sticks of every material, and bolts of strange, deeply hued fabric were strewn about the borders of the wide central room, and a massive table of shimmering wood dominated the area near the fire. It was, all in all, everything he had been led to expect from a witch’s house.
On the table were heaps of inchoate dough and ceramic pots of fragrant spices. The witch gestured towards it and a low chair. She turned to a large iron stove, her muscled back obscuring whatever task lay unfinished on its steaming surface. There was a long silence, stroked by the soft, slushing sounds of the Prince’s hand slowly, awkwardly pounding dough—for he kept his wounded fist at his side, so that his seeping blood would not stain the loaf. The pain had nearly left the stumps of his fingers. After a time, Knife looked up from the stove, shaking her gray hair like a foal, and spoke into the rough-hewn wall.
“You have your mother’s hair, you know, all those long curls like strips of bark. Not the color of course, but the heft of it.” Her voice was rough and pained. The Witch turned from her work and moved to the table with two clay cups of steaming greenish-yellow tea.
“Willow bark and wild mint,” she grunted, picking at the woodgrain, her face caught and silhouetted by the firelight. “And a bit of her eyes, though your father is there, too, black, reflecting nothing.”
The Prince’s breath stopped, and words rushed to his lips only to die strangled on his tongue. His whole body seemed to struggle with itself, until suddenly he was crying softly, salting the bread, his young shoulders shuddering.
“Please,” he begged, “how can you know anything of my mother? No—do not tell me, do not speak of her. Never speak of her.” He dried his eyes with the dirty cuff of his sleeve. “Tell me what happened to your grandmother in the cave, tell me old Star-tales no one believes anymore, but do not ask me to remember my mother.”
The Witch swallowed her tea.
“In the cell, Grandmother rubbed at her temples and drank a little of the polluted water left us in a decrepit iron jug. I waited patiently, still a good student. At length, she began again…”
IT WAS DARK, OF COURSE. THESE SORTS OF THINGS always begin in the dark. I leaned with my back against the rock wall, feeling the slight damp, the thick air of that stone womb which was blacker than black.
Ages passed. Or minutes.
I looked into the shadows, their substance, their limbs, their weight. At times, I felt at peace and watchful, as though I sat on the giant lip of a blue-black lily, its fat flesh curling underneath me, so perfect that no part of me could not be a part of it, and my body was changed, converted into its charcoal and gloam. At other times, I felt cold and alone and very small. But I felt the tiny, struggling light inside me, and it was warm as a fire at my feet. It spread through me as though I was a sieve of silk, left me clean and pure in that silent cavern. I sat with palms upturned, trying to hold the curve of darkness like a great hanging belly, thunder-black and written upon with swarthy symbols, all alive and breathing and swirling in the violet long-past-sunset.
I think I must have nearly fallen asleep, when suddenly my flesh sparked and shivered, and a thing began to coalesce out of the hematite air. I could not, at first, see anything at all but a length of deeper black amid the blackness. Its edges seemed to shimmer with light, a heat lightning crisping the edges of a shape, glowing like an afterimage. I was afraid, granddaughter, of course I was afraid. I cowered into the curve of the cavern, shaking like a newborn fawn.
At length I perceived a long head and flowing hair, luminous eyes round as moons. It seemed a part of the stone, a part of the night, a part of nothing I had ever come near to knowing. My eyes rolled in my head and sweat slicked my skin. My heart beat so fast I felt as though I had swallowed a hummingbird.
Finally, the outlines of the shape, rimmed in white fire, became clear and distinct.
In a moment it was utterly familiar to me, the long curve of black neck, the smooth haunches and velvet fur, a thick tail in a hundred braids brushing the cave floor, breath puffing from her great nostrils like pipe smoke: a horse beyond fantasies of horses, beyond any guess at size or hope of beauty, her ears seeming to brush the ceiling like stiff feathers, their twitchings carving some arcane verse on the rock. Scattered around her hooves lay charred jawbones and shoulder blades, and sternums like scepters.
The Mare watched me calmly, snorting occasionally and blinking her incandescen
t eyes. There was no sound for a space that seemed like a thousand winters joined at the snowline.
I still could not say where the courage came from, from what hidden place in me it sprung up and gurgled brightly, but I stood on clamoring legs and reached out my little hand to the creature, avoiding the rattling bones in their protective ring. I stroked her nose and the sides of her lightless face—and granddaughter, I cannot even now describe the softness of her flesh, the gentle glide of my hand over her thick, gleaming fur. Her skin was the texture of new cream, the shade of a crow flying high in a moonless night. She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure. Her eyes wheeled like suns and her great heart thundered against me. I buried my face in her mane and breathed the scent of wild earth and a burning sky. There was no other world but her.
