The monk slowly tucked the paper away in his pack. “So it is written, so shall it be.” Then he knelt before Aria, dragging his golden robe in the dust, and he touched his forehead to the dirty tops of her bare feet. “I pledge myself to you, Aria, daughter of Sadhann and Jaren, Goddess of War.”
Aria watched him silently. I started to cry.
* * * *
That night Jaren and I lay in bed and argued. Since Aria was born we had gotten in the habit of arguing softly, so we wouldn’t wake her. We spoke so softly now that we might have been drifting together in the moments after making love, both flat on our backs and staring up at the dark earth ceiling, while Aria slept, curled up against the far wall.
“We have no choice, Sadhann,” Jaren whispered. “The god himself has decreed it.”
“We could appeal,” I whispered back.
“We’re dirt to them, Sadhann. They’d just ignore us.”
I clamped my teeth shut tight against the cry I could feel in my throat. All that escaped was a hiss of air that ruffled the feathers of my pillow as I rolled over.
“You never wanted Aria,” I said, closing my eyes. “You wanted a boy.”
“Gods’ blood, Sadhann, would this be different if she was a boy?”
I pressed my lips tight together. I did not trust myself to speak.
Jeran sighed, and then I felt the touch of his rough fingers on my shoulder. “The gods know I love Aria, too.”
I blinked at the wall. “If they know,” I said, very slowly, as if I were dropping pebbles into a well to test the water level, “then why are they taking her away from us?”
His fingers stilled on my shoulder, then drifted away. He didn’t say anything, and I closed my eyes again.
The gods didn’t care for us. Surely this must be a joke, some cruel sport of the War God and his monks, to call up a dirt-girl. We had heard rumors from Terador that the gods in Itarra were in need of more slaves. I could almost picture the gold cuffs jangling on Aria’s small wrist. I buried my face in the pillow.
But there was a worse image in my head, in the dark. A tapestry of the gods hangs in the trial-house at Terador. On it, the gods of Death and War stand together, wearing the black and red uniforms that make them look like half-healed wounds, and each has a foot on a naked man. The man’s life runs out in rivers that pool into a slash of crimson thread at the bottom of the tapestry. In the dark, I saw Aria in this picture. She stood on the corpse and looked down at me with her old eyes, sword raised above her head in victory. But Aria—my Aria, whose warm weight I held against me when she woke from bad dreams in the night—my Aria was not there. The War God had bled her away, until she was nothing more than the red stitches at the bottom.
Mothers of boys expect war to steal their offspring some day. Out here in Reddis there is a good chance of that. With Aria, I worried about sickness and injury and that some day she would leave us to marry, that she might go away to a further frontier and we would never hear from her again. I did not expect war to take her.
I couldn’t sleep. I went out into the night as quietly as I could, and Jaren let me go.
I couldn’t remember the last time a storm had cooled the air. The night was hot and dust-filled. The wind wrapped my cotton shift around my legs as I walked, barefoot, down the path to the fields and road. The hard, smooth dirt, still warm from the day, felt good on the soles of my feet, and the walking helped ease that feeling I had inside of not having enough air. The grass was alive with the high chirrah of locusts. When I came to the edge of the road, I sat down in the dust and watched the monks’ camp.
At that moment it seemed impossible that the world was going on as it always had, with these men lodged in the middle of our grass like a colony of ants. I felt like I was sleepwalking. The monks poured corn beer and wine for each other out of hammered silver ewers and drank from cups of bronze and gold. The pillows on which they reclined were worked in such rich reds I couldn’t guess the dyes or what fabrics they were made from. Flower petals lay scattered on the ground to ease and perfume the monks’ travel-worn feet. Every now and then one of the men would reach into the middle of the circle, where a fine wooden table supported more food than we ate in weeks. The mottled brown feathers of a roasted pheasant stuffed with grapes gleamed in the lantern-light. A silver dish beside it held slices of red tomatoes, so ripe and dark that they looked almost black. The smell of food made my mouth water.
One of the monks rose from his pillows and walked toward me. I scrambled to my feet, prepared to run, but the monk said, “Wait.”
The Senior. I bowed low. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean any harm.”
He waved away my apology and held out a cup. “Go on,” he said. “Take it. It’s for you.”
I put my hand around the stem of the cup, barely aware of what I was doing. Slivers of ice floated on the surface of the wine.
Ice. Itarran magic. The hot prairie wind greedily ate it, making the goblet sweat.
“Sit,” the Senior said. He had already done so, cross-legged in the dirt like a commoner. I obeyed, still feeling as if I were dreaming.
“She was born to be War,” he said. “We do nothing that isn’t fated.”
I didn’t speak for a moment. Then I said, “She’s only a little girl.”
“She is now. Children grow up.”
I stared at the wine. “She’ll grow up to be a woman. Will you deny her a husband? Children of her own? Happiness?”
I marveled at myself that the words came out. But the monk didn’t scold me. Instead he sat quiet for a time, and I put my dry, wind-cracked lips to the lip of the cool bronze goblet and drank.
The wine was cold. I’d had nothing cold since winter.
“Sadhann,” the monk said. “Would you deny her this?”
He swept his hand out toward the monks’ camp, the flowers, the pheasants, the laughter and music. He stared at me for a moment and I bent my head and looked at the wine instead.
He sighed and climbed to his feet. With a start I got to my feet, too, holding out the half-drunk goblet of wine for him to take back.
“Drink, Sadhann,” he said. “We will come again in the morning.”
But I’d had more than my share already. I licked the water droplets off the outside of the cup before they could fall to the dust, wasted.
I stayed there by the road almost until dawn, watching the monks’ big, gold-stitched tent ripple in the night wind. Perhaps Aria would sleep there, on a bed whose mattress was not made of corn shucks. Perhaps there would be no bedbugs to leave red bumps in the morning. Perhaps they would feed her grapes and tomatoes and pheasant while she sat on deep pile carpets and had servants dust her hair with violets and rub the chubby pads of her fingers with fragrant oils. Perhaps they would give her fine-spun cotton to wear, and leather boots so she wouldn’t catch cold when it rained, and maybe she would have fine, soft furs to keep her warm when it snowed. And perhaps she would learn to play a keipa like the monks did and recline on pillows and laugh like the ladies in Terador, behind her veils. And all these monks would have to do her bidding, because she would be their War Goddess.
She would be a little wild thing.
I wondered what the monks would do when she had a nightmare. I always stroked her hair until she fell asleep again, and then I listened to her breathe and put my hand on her back so I could feel the breath moving in her. It was said that the gods found their avatars by searching for them in their dreams. I wondered how different it would have been to cuddle her against my breast and wipe away her tears with my hand if I had known. As I watched the monks sing and eat, I wondered how I would treat her, if by some miracle the god changed his mind and gave her back to me—if I would bite my tongue instead of scolding her when she trampled the young bean plants, if I would watch her eyelids flutter in her sleep and think not of childish things but of war dreams. My Aria, the War Goddess.