When Women Were Warriors
Book I: The Warrior’s Path
Chapter 24: A Game With Rules
At midnight Maara woke me. For a moment I didn’t remember where I was. I looked up and saw the branches of the oak tree against the starry sky. I heard Cael’s voice, then Donal’s deeper one. My warrior was already buckling on her armor. I got up and tried to help her, but my fingers were clumsy.
“I can do it,” she told me. “Get our pack ready.”
“What happened?”
“Hurry,” she said.
In a few minutes all of us were ready — Donal and Kenit, Cael and Alpin, Maara and me. There was no moon that night. We made do with starlight as we stumbled through the pastures to the foot of Greth’s Tor, where Laris and Taia waited for us.
“Two fires,” I heard someone say.
We walked all night, traveling north, finding our direction by the bear stars. When light began to show in the eastern sky, Laris led us into the shelter of a stand of trees that lay between two hills.
“If we’re lucky, they’ll come through here,” she said. “It’s an easy trail, and they may be trying to stay out of sight of the Tor.”
Laris took Cael aside, and they had a brief whispered conversation. Then Cael and Alpin started up the hill behind us.
“Where are they going?” I asked Maara.
“They’re going to find a vantage point. The people who were so careless with their fires last night may make the same mistake again this morning.”
We waited under the trees for a long time before Cael and Alpin returned. They had seen nothing. Laris was undecided about what to do. She called the warriors together to talk things over. The general feeling was that if we kept going north, we might miss the travelers, who could have taken another way and gone past us, or we might run into them unexpectedly and risk a confrontation before we knew their strength.
Then we heard in the distance the groaning of cart wheels and the heavy tread of oxen’s feet. At once Laris had us spread out on both sides of the cattle trail that wound through the dale. We found hiding places where we could and waited.
Whoever was approaching wasn’t trying to be quiet. I heard a man’s voice coax his beasts over a rough place. A few minutes later he spoke again, and another man answered him.
They soon came into view — two oxen pulling a two-wheeled cart with a woman and three men walking beside it. The cart didn’t appear to be heavily laden, but where the trail ran uphill, the oxen strained against their yoke. One of the men carried a pole for driving them. None carried weapons.
Laris stepped out from her hiding place and blocked the trail, and Donal too showed himself. The rest of us stayed hidden.
Laris approached the man driving the oxen, and they talked for a few minutes. Maara and I were too far away to hear what was said. The man lifted the covering of oxhide to show Laris the contents of the cart. Once she had inspected everything, she motioned to the rest of us to show ourselves.
The strangers were traders, bringing tin and copper ingots and some finished goods, farming implements and an assortment of bowls and cooking pots. They had been traveling with another group of traders who had left them that morning to travel farther west. It was their fires we had seen. I was both relieved and disappointed.
We traveled south with the traders, even though their oxen moved so slowly, because they brought news and gossip with them. Maara seemed to want to keep her distance from them, so she and I walked on ahead.
“What would we have done if they had been cattle raiders?” I asked Maara.
“That would depend on how many there were. If we could have done so safely, we would have confronted them and made them turn back.”
“That’s all?”
“What else should we do?”
“What would prevent them from coming back another day?”
“They might try again somewhere else. If we caught them a second time, we would know they hadn’t taken our warning seriously, and we would have to make them pay for their arrogance with blood.”
“Would we kill them?”
“We would have to fight them. Blood might be spilled, and someone might die, but it would be better if no one did.”
I knew what she meant. Once begun, a blood feud was difficult to stop. Still I didn’t understand how we could protect our cattle if we didn’t fight.
“It’s like a game,” she said. “We know they’re coming, and they know we’re waiting for them. The game will prove who is stronger and more clever. They may succeed in taking a few cattle home with them, but they don’t want to fight with us. No one wants to die for a few cattle.”
“What would happen if they did outnumber us?” I asked her.
“That’s what Laris was concerned about. She wouldn’t put us in harm’s way until she knew how many they were. If we had been outnumbered, we would never have shown ourselves. Laris would have taken us back to the farmstead as fast as we could go and called for help.”
“Help? Who would help us?”
“The farmers,” she said. “At least until we could send for more of our warriors. But it’s not likely a raiding party would outnumber us by more than a few.”
“Why not?”
“Because then it wouldn’t be a raiding party. It would be war party, a real threat, and we would have to do more than just warn them away.”
Like the games I had played in childhood, cattle raiding seemed to be a game with rules that everybody understood. But if cattle weren’t worth dying for, why had Maara almost died defending them?
“Why did you have to fight last year?” I asked her.
Maara glanced back over her shoulder to see if anyone was close enough to overhear. Then she said, “Vintel made a mistake.”
“What did she do?”
“She didn’t show herself and challenge them. She didn’t give them time to take what they needed and get away. She was angry because they had killed one of our animals. She drew her sword and ran at them, and we had no choice but to follow her.”
“Were you outnumbered?”
“No,” she said. “We were evenly matched, and we took them by surprise. If we hadn’t, if we had given them time to prepare to meet us, they might have done us a lot more harm.”
I saw in my mind’s eye the image of Maara lying on a bloody litter.
“They did quite enough harm as it was,” I said.
We walked on in silence for a while. I had forgotten about cattle raiders. I was thinking about Vintel.
“Why does everyone admire Vintel’s leadership?” I asked.
“One mistake doesn’t make her a bad leader.”
“What she did was foolish.”
“Most people would consider what she did courageous.”
“Do you?”
Maara shook her head. “What Vintel showed that day wasn’t courage. Vintel loves a fight. The butchered calf gave her an excuse.”
“She risked the lives of her warriors because she loves a fight?”
“There’s a place for leaders like Vintel,” Maara said. “In time of war, she would go joyfully into battle, carrying the hearts of her warriors with her.”
“This isn’t a time of war.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
***
It would be our turn to watch that night, and Laris wanted to accompany the traders a little farther on their journey, so Maara and I went alone up Greth’s Tor. Before we were halfway to the top, I was stumbling from exhaustion.
When we reached the campsite, Maara told me to lie down. I was so tired I didn’t protest. I was determined to rest for only a little while, but I fell into a deep sleep and must have slept for several hours. It was late afternoon when Maara woke me. Laris and Taia were coming up the hill.
After we kept the evening watch, all four of us sat around the fireless hearth while Laris told us what she had learned from the traders. The northern tribes had had a poor harvest the year before, and the winter had been hard for them. Those who were starving stole from those who had little more than they did. It was a fortunate thing for us, because as long as they were fighting among themselves, they were leaving us alone.
“That explains why we have yet to see a raiding party this year,” Laris said.
“Let’s hope this year they have a better harvest,” said Maara. “When all of them are starving, their shared misery will bind them together. That’s when they’ll come to trouble us.”
“They say you lived once among the northern tribes.”
Laris’s tone was casual, but she and Taia and I all seemed to hold our breath, waiting for my warrior’s answer.
“No,” said Maara.
“But you know their language and their ways,” Laris persisted.
“I know enough of their language to exchange a few words with them. That’s all.”
“Then how do you know so much about what they’re likely to do?”
Maara studied Laris’s face. A cautious look came into her eyes, as if she were standing on the threshold of a trust that could not be taken back.
“My people were more like your people than the people you call northerners,” she said at last. “We were never allied with any of the northern tribes, but we traded with them sometimes, and sometimes we preyed upon them. We knew a little of their language because we traded with them, and we knew something of their ways because they were our enemies.”
“You traded with your enemies?”
“We traded with whoever had what we wanted,” Maara said. “If we couldn’t trade, we fought them for it.”
I would have liked to ask her what kinds of things her people needed to trade for. My family traded wool for grain, but that was an exchange of gifts between friends. Every year we sent wagons filled with bales of wool to Merin’s house, and when they returned, they brought us a share of the harvest. I thought better of questioning Maara just then. I decided I would rather talk to her in private about it.
“Where do your people live?” Laris asked her.
Maara shook her head. “They’re not my people anymore.”
***
I was glad I had slept that afternoon. If I hadn’t, I would have toppled over where I sat and missed the entire conversation. I would also have missed the look Laris gave me when Taia stumbled off to bed. Laris expected me to follow Taia, and when I didn’t, her impatient frown told me that she was waiting for me to leave her alone with Maara. It didn’t come as a complete surprise when the thought occurred to me that Laris might be looking for more than someone to share blankets with. That made me all the more determined to take my place at Maara’s side, at least until she herself told me to do differently.
I was in fact not at all sleepy. I watched Laris stifle her yawns while she waited for me to go to bed. Maara didn’t seem tired, although she had been up since the middle of the previous night.
Finally I said to her, “You need to sleep.”
She looked at me and nodded, and I took her cloak and mine and made a bed for us, as I had when we were on the Tor with Cael and Alpin.
Laris understood what I had done. When our bed was ready, I touched Maara’s shoulder and offered her my hand to help her up. Laris caught my eye. My grandmother used to say that someone had looked daggers at her, and that phrase came back to me when I met Laris’s eyes. I knew better than to look away from a look like that. I held her gaze, not as a challenge, but to show her that I knew what she wanted and that I intended, if I could, to prevent her having it.
That night, as I lay beside my warrior, I wondered what it was about Laris that bothered me. Maara had the right to lie with anyone she chose, and if she wished to lie with Laris, no one had the right to interfere. Still the thought kept coming back to me that Laris didn’t love Maara. She may have been fascinated by her, but what fascinated her was the people Maara came from, not Maara herself.
Sparrow would have laughed at me. I could almost hear her teasing voice asking me what there was to be upset about. The only answer I could think of was that Maara deserved better. She deserved to be loved for herself.
***
We spent a month at Greth’s Tor. The cattle raiders never came. We encountered no one but a few traders with their caravans. Because we could see anyone approaching us from quite a distance, raids against our cattle there seldom succeeded, but it was unusual that no one made the attempt.
Other places along our borders were more hilly or more wooded. It was easier for raiders to approach unseen there, and our warriors had to be always on the move along the frontier. Word came to us that raiding parties had made off with a few cattle in some of those places. I wished we had gone there instead. We would at least have had a little more to do, and the prospect of encountering a raiding party was still unreal enough to me to be exciting.
I think Alpin felt as I did, but Taia had been to Greth’s Tor the year before and was content to have been sent there a second time. She seemed not to relish the idea of challenging cattle raiders or wandering the countryside.
On our last morning on the Tor, we made a show of keeping watch, but I think we all passed the time just enjoying the beauty of the place.
During our stay there, the weather had often been unsettled. Sometimes we’d had to sit huddled under our cloaks through spring showers, and when it wasn’t rainy, the nights could be quite cold. The last few days, though, had been warm and fine.
Maara came to sit beside me.
“Your first adventure has been uneventful,” she said
I nodded.
“Are you disappointed?”
I was, a little. I nodded again, but I said, “I know I should be glad.”
“Most of the days of a warrior’s life are uneventful,” she said, “but the others more than make up for it.”
Even as I leaned back against the sun-warmed rock, I felt a chill go down my spine.
“How do we know the raiders won’t come as soon as we’ve gone home?” I asked her.
“They have other work to do now. They’re farmers too.”
Maara ran her hand over the rock that sheltered us. A piece the size of a bird’s egg broke off in her hand. She admired it for a moment. Then she handed it to me and smiled.
“Giant’s bones,” she said.
Copyright © Catherine M. Wilson
