The Warrior's Path (2 page)

The Lady gazed at my mother for a moment, then turned to me. She drew her sword and set its point against my breastbone. I knew my part. I set my fear aside and met her eyes. Her eyes held mine, but it was not my eyes she saw. What her gaze rested on, only she could see. I thought I heard the din of battle, but how could I have known what that sound was when I had never before heard it. The smoke of burning homes and fields drifted before my eyes, and the smell of burning reached me on a sudden breeze.

The Lady put her sword away and smiled at me. The smoke vanished, and with it the smell of burning, and the only sound I heard was the voices of the people in the hall.

A servant led me to a seat at another table, where I joined a group of girls my own age. They talked and laughed together, and bit by bit they drew me into their conversation. I learned that they were the companions. Each girl served one of the warriors. Many were apprenticed to their warriors and would become warriors themselves someday.

“You won’t be apprenticed,” one girl told me. “You’re too small.”

“My mother is a warrior,” I replied, “and she’s no bigger than I am.”

“Has she fought in battle?” the girl asked me.

I had to admit that she had not.

For a while I had been aware that I was being watched by the girl who sat across the table from me. She was long-boned and thin, and she would have been pretty if her expression were not so wary. She had not yet spoken to me. I caught her eye.

“I am Tamras, daughter of Tamnet,” I told her. “Who are you?”

“Sparrow,” she said, and turned to talk to the girl sitting next to her.

From time to time I glanced back at my mother, who sat beside the Lady. She would spend the evening with her friend, and in the morning she would leave for home. It might be years before I saw her again.

My first night in Merin’s house I found it hard to sleep. The other girls treated me with kindness. They found me some bedding and made a place for me in their sleeping loft, but I still felt like a stranger. There were more people here than I had ever seen together at once. How would I be able to remember them all?

Everything about the place felt strange to me. Nights at home were quiet. Here there was a constant noise of people — moving, talking, coughing, sleeping. Cracking and creaking noises startled me, and the other girls laughed at me a little. They told me it was the timbers of the house settling against each other. Stone houses make no sound.

Even the smells were unfamiliar. The heavy smell of roasting meat hung in the air. We seldom roasted meat at home. In Merin’s house they set quarters of beef over open fires, and the fat fell uncollected into the flames.

Other smells tumbled together — wood smoke and the sap that oozed from the timbers, the dusty straw strewn upon the floors downstairs, the animals in the pens outside, and other things I didn’t recognize.

I tried to remember how I had felt at home when I was looking forward to seeing someplace new. Everything there was so familiar that I longed for something different. Now I longed for just one familiar thing. I felt like a bird, caged all its life, set free by an open window and cowering upon the windowsill.

In the morning the Lady Merin sent a servant to bring me to her private chamber. Then I learned that what I had been told the night before was true. I would not be trained in the use of arms. Instead the Lady made me the companion of a warrior, a woman who had been in the household only a short time.

Though I tried to hide my disappointment, the Lady understood what I was feeling. I was the first daughter of my house. The blood of warriors ran in my veins, and a warrior’s place was my inheritance.

“For the time being,” the Lady told me, “you can serve me best by doing what I ask. You have the right to refuse, but I hope you will stay with us. Your mother handled weapons well despite her size. One day you may be strong enough to inherit her sword.”

So she didn’t take my hope away from me, and I stayed with her.

The companions’ loft was just a platform over the end of the great hall farthest from the hearth. It had no walls, only a railing to keep us from toppling over the side.

The warriors slept upstairs, above the kitchen, each in her own tiny room partitioned off from the others by flimsy walls of wattle.

One of the companions showed me to my warrior’s room. She rapped on the doorpost, and before we heard an answer, she gave me a furtive look, then turned and fled back down the stairs. When there was still no answer to her knock, I pulled aside the curtain covering the doorway and went in.

My warrior was sitting cross-legged on her bed, the only piece of furniture in the room except for a small chest beside it. The morning light streamed in through the window and fell across her hands as she mended an old pair of boots. She looked up at me.

“I’m your companion,” I said.

“I don’t want a companion,” she replied.

She glared at me with dark and angry eyes until I couldn’t meet them anymore. When I looked away, she resumed her mending and paid me no more attention. I felt like running out the door, but my feet refused to move. I stood silent before her as if turned to stone.

After a little while my curiosity overcame my fear. There was something odd about her. I couldn’t think what it was. I’d had only one brief glimpse of her. Now the dark hair that tumbled loose over her shoulders fell forward and hid her face as she looked down at her work. Her dark eyes were all I could remember.

There was nothing unusual about her clothing. She wore a linen shirt the color of walnuts. Her trousers, like my own, were made of wool and dyed a darker brown. Her leather armor hung from a peg beside her bed, along with a sword in its scabbard and a shield, which bore no device.

She didn’t speak again. When the boots were mended, she put them on. Then she took her armor from the peg, slipped it on, and buckled it. By the time it occurred to me to help her, it was too late. She pushed past me and was out the door so quickly that I had to run to catch her as she went down the stairs and through the great hall.

Once outdoors she turned to face me. Though her eyes were no longer angry, they warned me not to follow her. She turned and strode away. I followed her anyway, but at a cautious distance, as she crossed the yard and threaded her way through the maze of earthworks. Outside the palisade I stopped and watched her walk down the hill, until she disappeared behind a stand of trees.

By the time my first day in Merin’s house was over, I was glad to see the end of it. The other girls told me that I would soon get used to life here, that the first few days are always hard, but I feared it might be many days before I felt at home.

Most of the companions came from households as large as this one. Just a few grew up in tiny villages like mine. As I listened to the talk in the companions’ loft that evening, I began to understand how different this place was from the only other place I knew. Villages in the hill country have little to tempt thieves. Here there were raids against the farms, grain and cattle stolen, border skirmishes.

I had heard tales of war all my life, but I didn’t realize that, even in a time of peace, there would be so much fighting. The warriors proved their value constantly. Without them, all that the land yielded would be taken from us. Without them, other tribes would take the land itself.

Aside from the servants, everyone living in Merin’s house was either a warrior or the companion of a warrior. The Lady kept the old traditions. Only women lived in this house. The men lived in a smaller house close by. They took their meals here and had the freedom of the great hall, but the rest of the house was forbidden to them.

The old women lived here too. They had been warriors once. Now, as members of the council, they served the Lady with wisdom instead of weapons.

I was afraid to tell the other companions that my warrior had refused me, but they already knew. They had expected it. They said I should just go about my work and pay her no attention. How could anyone pay her no attention?

Early the next morning I went to my warrior’s room only to find her gone, so I did as the companions had suggested and looked around for things to do. I swept the floor and aired the bedding. I emptied the slop jar. I filled the lamp with oil and trimmed the wick. I found some dirty clothing, a few worn woolen shirts and a pair of woolen trousers, and took them downstairs to wash them. Late that afternoon, when I returned them to my warrior clean and dry, she accepted them without a word.

There was nothing else to do, so I returned to my place in the companions’ loft. My heart was sore, and I had hoped to be alone there for a while, but I found Sparrow waiting for me. A year older than I, she was well-grown and strong enough to be apprenticed to her warrior. My face told her I was unhappy.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked me.

“I will be the first of my family without a shield,” I said, “and my warrior has no need of me. If there’s no place for me here, I might as well go home. At least I can be of some use to my family.”

Sparrow frowned her disapproval. “Are you so easily discouraged?”

I understood her, and I was ashamed.

“Don’t judge me by a handful of words,” I said.

In time I came to realize that Sparrow meant well. Sometimes she said hurtful things, but when the sting was gone, I saw that she was teaching me how to conduct myself in Merin’s house. So as not to shame my family, I hid my disappointment and my loneliness and lived each day as it came. My grandmother used to tell me that was how to get through hard times.

My warrior’s name was Maara, a name I had never heard before. No one in Merin’s house knew anything of her family or where she’d come from. No one I asked had spoken with her beyond what was necessary for daily life. The few who had tried to befriend her she’d rebuffed, and now they had little good to say of her.

Every day I did my best at whatever work I could find to do, while my warrior did her best to stay away from me. She hardly spoke to me, and when she did, it was either to send me away or to find fault with me for something. None of the other companions would put up with her. They assured me that when I had mastered the duties of a companion I could choose someone else.

While I was grateful to them for telling me I was not at fault, I was young enough to believe that I might succeed with my warrior where they had not. It was hard to bear her treatment of me when I was still so lonely in that house, but I was determined not to fail at the only thing the Lady had asked of me.

As they did every year in springtime, cattle raiders came out of the north, and our warriors left Merin’s house to guard our borders against them. The other warriors took their companions, but Maara made me stay behind. With her away there was even less for me to do.

I wasn’t idle long. A few days later they were back again. They had caught a band of cattle raiders in the act of butchering a calf and engaged them in a skirmish. One of them had hurt my warrior badly. His blade glanced off her shield and bit deep into her thigh. When she fell, he tried to finish her, and the force of his blow on her shield broke the bones of her forearm.

It was evening when her comrades brought her home. In the fading light the litter on which they bore her was black with blood. I helped the tired warriors carry her upstairs. When we set the litter down beside her bed, my hands were sticky, red in the lamplight.

My warrior lay unmoving, her eyes closed. She looked as if she might already be embarking on her journey to another world. We were about to put her on the bed when the healer came in to tend her.

“Let her bleed there on the floor,” she said. So we left her there.

My mother was a healer. She had taught me the use of herbs, and I often accompanied her when she was called to tend someone. I had helped her set broken bones and stitch up cuts made by the slip of an ax or knife, but I had never seen a wound like this one. It gaped open and bled until I wondered how my warrior could have any blood left in her.

I helped the healer remove her armor and her clothing. Together we set her broken arm. Then I watched as the healer cleaned and closed her dreadful wound. When the healer had done all she could, we washed the blood from my warrior’s body and put her into bed.

“I fear our work has been for nothing,” the healer told me. “I’ll brew something for her pain. Give it to her if she wakes tonight.”

In a little while a kitchen servant brought a bowl of tea. I took a sip of it. Bitter hops masked the strong taste of valerian root. It was a potent sleeping drug that would let my warrior sleep away her pain. It would let her sleep away her life. I poured it out into the slop jar.

I had no reason to care about the woman who thought she had no need of me. Her refusal of me had stung my pride. Perhaps I saw my chance to prove my value to her or to put her in my debt. I wish I could say I nursed her out of kindness, but it wasn’t true.

I waited until I thought everyone had gone to bed. Then I went down to the kitchen. The fragrance of lemon grass, just brought in to dry, led me to a little room behind the ovens. There I found what I was seeking. Herbs hung in bunches from drying racks. Shelves of pots, each containing a dried herb properly prepared, lined the walls. I soon found the ones I wanted — shepherd’s purse to stop her bleeding, sage and bloodwort to restore her blood. I put them into the bowl in which the healer had brewed her tea. In the embers of the cooking fire was a cauldron of water hot enough to steep the herbs. I found a ladle and filled the bowl.

I returned to my warrior’s room. After the tea had cooled a bit, I dipped a clean cloth into it and put it to her lips. The tea trickled into her mouth and down her throat. When I saw her swallow, I knew it was safe to give her more.

All night I sat beside her on the bed. Several times she woke, and I encouraged her to drink more of the tea. I doubt she was aware of me, but she was thirsty, and she drank. Before the night was over, the bowl was empty.