Winter came somewhat more gently here than it did north of the river. The rolling green country and the thickets of trees broke the wind, and the rain was a little softer. But when the cold and the snow came, they came fast and hard.
They bound Sparrow to Old Woman’s camp, where all had been made ready for them. There was ample food stored in the shelter, fodder for the horses and goats until they could go out again to forage, and the shelter itself was made larger with Keen’s and Sparrow’s labor, till it held the three of them in comfort, and the horses, too.
Old Woman at first seemed much as she always had. But as the cold went on and the snow deepened with storm after storm, even to Sparrow’s less than loving eye it seemed that she was not as strong as she had been. She slept longer, rose later, spoke less.
So too did Keen, but Keen was swelling with the child; in her it was strength. In Old Woman it was a clear fading.
Sparrow had seen it before. The old could die at any time of the year, but winter was most bitter for them. The Grandmother had died in winter, in much the same way, though it seemed she had gone much more slowly. Old Woman was like a dry stick in the fire, flaring swiftly into ash.
She did not slow or stop her odd oblique teaching for that. The brief storm-ridden days and long cold nights were made for turning the spirit inward.
Sparrow traveled far within, and far without as well, riding the winds of the world. Sometimes Old Woman flew near her, a presence sensed but not seen. Her spirit was growing stronger as her body weakened. Death for her would be triumphant, a soaring into light.
She was eager for it. She had lived a long, long time; had outlived a tribe, and lived past the deaths of any who had been born the year she was born. She was ready to cast off the outworn skin and fly free.
But she did not go. She clung to life and breath, as little as that was. Keen particularly, but Sparrow too, made her as comfortable as they could, kept her wrapped in furs, kept the fire burning well and tried to tempt her with warm herb-possets and goat’s milk laced with honey. What she would not eat, which was most of it, Sparrow forced on Keen—“For the baby,” she said when Keen resisted. Keen would obey then, though not willingly.
oOo
The dark of the year came upon them. That year was a Great Year: when new moon and longest night were one and the same. Even without priests to count the days and reckon the moon’s phases, Sparrow knew when it came. It was in her blood and bone, deep as the breath she drew.
With the moon’s waning, Old Woman waned, too. Night by night she sank lower. The night before the new moon, she seemed nearly to have stopped breathing, but when the sun rose, she revived a little. Enough to say to Sparrow who was stirring the last of the honeycomb into the milk that she had taken from one of the she-goats a few moments before: “You, rude child. Come here.”
Sparrow was startled enough at the sound of that voice, faint and fading as it was, to do as it bade her. Old Woman’s eyes were almost as bright as ever, seeing far too clearly through all her pretensions.
“I never did teach you manners,” Old Woman said. “But that’s no matter now. I’ll die tonight, in the moon’s dark. Be sure you stay awake and watch me go. And when I’m gone, there is that which you must do.”
Sparrow frowned. “Do you think I’ll fall asleep, then?”
“You’ll be tempted. Don’t give in to it. You have to watch. And then you have to do as I tell you. Do it exactly. Do you understand?”
“Tell me what it is,” Sparrow said.
Old Woman told her. Sparrow listened in horror. When the dry and dying voice had gone silent, she said, “I can’t do that.”
“You can. Because you must.”
“But—”
“I don’t matter, child. Not any longer. You need this. Therefore you will do it.”
“Why do I need it?”
“Always the questions,” Old Woman sighed. “Always ‘Why?’ Child, when it’s done, you will know.”
“You said that of my being a shaman. When I was one, I would know. But I never have!”
“Yes,” Old Woman said. And with that, maddeningly, she slipped back into her long dream. Nothing that Sparrow did or said could rouse her.
oOo
Keen wanted to stay. But Old Woman had made it clear: she was not to be part of this thing that had been laid on Sparrow. It was a mild day, for winter; the sun was almost warm. She took the stallion as Old Woman had instructed, and rode off eastward. There was a tribe camped at only a little distance, Old Woman said. The people there would welcome her and look after her.
Sparrow did not like that any better than Keen did. “You’d entrust her to strangers?” she had demanded of Old Woman.
“Not strangers,” Old Woman said. “They know me, and know of my guests. She’ll be more than safe with them.”
Sparrow had to accept that, as Keen did, because Old Woman was firm. It was to be done just so. Neither of them was given a choice.
Therefore, in the morning, Keen rode away. The stallion carried her gladly, with understanding of his duty. Sparrow would have preferred that the mare do that, too; but the mare must stay. She was part of the rite that loomed ahead of Sparrow.
There were preparations. Sparrow made them. They did not take long enough; the day still stretched interminable. Old Woman lay like a banked fire, the life in her sinking low.
At long last the sun set. It was a mild night for winter, but with an edge of frost. The stars were high and far away. By their cold faint light, Sparrow lifted Old Woman in her arms, finding her as light as a bundle of sticks, and carried her out of the shelter.
The mare was waiting, a white glimmer in the starlight. Sparrow laid Old Woman over the white back and held her there. The mare stepped softly under that fragile weight, picking her way through the snow, climbing to the summit of the hill.
It was a low hill, but the stars had granted it some of their lofty height. The world seemed to spread beneath it, a pattern of signs and images like the embroidery of Sparrow’s coat.
She stood beside the mare on the hilltop and eased Old Woman’s limp light body down. It was alive, but the life clung to it by a thread.
She laid it gently in the snow. It was beyond cold and beyond fear. She, who was neither, still was taken somewhat out of herself. Such cold and fear as she felt were remote, and therefore bearable.
She was the mare’s chosen, Horse Goddess’ child. She was high priestess of a rite that had not been seen in the world before, a new rite, terrible and holy.
There in the dark of the moon, under the winter stars, she sang the words that came to her, words as high and cold and sweet as the stars’ own singing. She called on Horse Goddess and Earth Mother and the gods of death and rebirth. She invoked the mare, and the life that swelled within the mare. And finally, kneeling in the snow, she bowed low before the old woman, the shaman of the lost tribe, the firstmother of this new order that was made flesh in her.
She bowed in deep respect, and in admiration, too; and if not in love, then in more esteem than she had ever thought to feel for that rough-spoken, ungentle creature. For they were very like—as like as kin, whatever the truth of that might have been. They had, in their way, been as grandmother and granddaughter. What the Grandmother had begun, Old Woman had completed.
So it was done. She drew the knife that Old Woman had bidden her take, long and wicked, with a strange black blade and a haft of polished bone. Singing, wordless now, a long, high keen, she performed the sacrifice. She severed the thread that bound spirit to body.
The body lay still and cold. The spirit soared up, matching the note of her song, swelling it, till it rang in the sky.
oOo
The silence that fell thereafter was enormous, and bore still a memory of sound. In it, with steady hand, she took the heart from the still breast and the liver from the belly. She offered them up to the gods. In their name, and by Old Woman’s firm command, she ate of each: heart for knowledge, liver for spirit. They were warm and rich with blood—richer than she would ever have expected.
In blood was life. It drained out over the snow, black in starlight. She bowed low again, with the taste of blood in her mouth. Old Woman’s command had been strict. She had no choice but to follow it. As if the body had been the carcass of a deer, she gutted and flayed it, stripped flesh from bones, and made a great offering of the flesh. She set it in fire that she had prepared on the hilltop, a tall pyre of cured wood that Old Woman had set aside in a hidden place, and lit it from the hearthfire, so that it blazed up to heaven.
The bones she kept, polishing them till they were white and clean. In bright firelight she buried them in the grave that she had dug that day, laying them with care as if they had been the bones of a king. She covered them with the hide of a white mare, a mighty thing and holy: first of the white mares that had been in the world, foaled when Old Woman was young, in the grim spring after her people were destroyed.
She had been Old Woman’s hope and her salvation. She had died at a great age, in the herd of her children and grandchildren, all of them greys as she was, sires and dams of greys, a whole royal race from whom Sparrow’s own mare had sprung.
Now her hide covered Old Woman’s bones. They needed no other shroud, and no greater treasure.
But the globe of the skull, Sparrow did not bury. When she had raised the cairn over Old Woman’s bones, that remnant lay waiting, unburned and unburied. Grey dawn shone on it. The fire had died to embers and ash.
Sparrow bowed to the corpse of the fire, and deeper to the cairn in which lay the bones, but deepest of all to the skull, the clean white bone still faintly tinged with the rose sheen of blood. She took it up in her hands, turned and carried it down from the hill, as the sun rose full in her eyes.
oOo
She made a cup of the skull, as men did with the heads of their enemies. Three days she labored over it. She scoured and polished it. She inlaid it with stones as Old Woman had instructed her, such stones as she had not seen before, blue as the summer sky. With the black knife she carved a winding spiral pattern, the same as that which wove round about her breasts and belly, and colored it with soot from the bonfire and with red ocher that was almost as bright as blood.
All the while she did this, Old Woman’s spirit watched, hovering above her, offering acid commentary. It was no more gentle than it had been in life, and no more complimentary, either. And yet, perhaps because it was freed of the flesh, it could not deceive Sparrow as it had done before. She could sense its approval, however grudging and however well hidden. Old Woman was pleased, though she loathed to admit it.
On the third day the cup was complete, or as much so as Sparrow could make it. It was a beautiful thing, a terrible beauty, like the rite that had made it. When she lifted it in her hands, she could feel the power pooling in it. Sunlight poured into it like water, filling it, brimming over.
She carried the cup to the stream that ran through Old Woman’s camp. The water was icy cold and very swift. It filled the cup quickly, mingling with the sunlight. Sparrow, kneeling by the bank, lifted it up to sun and sky—and yes, to Old Woman’s spirit that hovered still—then lowered it to her lips and drank.
It was like drinking winter, pure and cold, and yet sun’s warmth was woven in it. It turned her blood to ice and then to fire. It pooled in her belly. There in her center, the rite was complete: heart and liver, blood and bone.
With a sigh that seemed half exasperation, Old Woman’s spirit took wing at last, arrowing into the sun. Yet it left a part of itself behind, as a bird might: a feather of living light. It drifted gently down into the cup, and there rested, melting and flowing, until it had vanished into the cleansed and polished surface.
The cup was alive in her hands. She could feel the warmth in it, the presence that would not leave it now, not till the cup itself was broken and its fragments ground to powder.
Which will happen, said a voice in her mind, a voice very like Old Woman’s, when you die yourself, and your successor makes of your skull a new cup.
That would not be soon, if she survived the war that was coming. She set the thought aside, and the cup, too, wrapping it in soft doeskin and concealing it among the belongings in the shelter. Old Woman’s shelter—hers now, if she chose to stay.
Or she could go. She was free. She was, by every rite, a shaman.
“I still don’t know that I am one,” she said.
Somewhere perhaps, Old Woman ground her few teeth in frustration. But Sparrow could not lie to herself, or to Old Woman either.
The power that was in her, that she had drunk from the cup, still needed something to be whole. Time, maybe. Wisdom. Patience. Patience above all, one of the many virtues which Sparrow signally lacked.