The procession stopped at the edge of our field, where the circles of corn, beans, and squash left off to nodding stalks of grass and tangled, half-burnt morning glory vines, and a group of monks in the middle lowered a wooden litter to the ground. I couldn’t imagine a place where that many trees grew, that wood would be used to carry people. We had a few stunted cottonwoods growing along the wash, but the wash was drying up and so were the trees. Rich ‘steaders used wood to frame their houses or to heat them in winter. Most of us made do with bricks of sod.
Until I saw the litter, I didn’t think that the monks had walked all the way from Itarra, capital of the empire. Terador, maybe. But not Itarra.
A monk got out of the litter and walked toward me, and I smoothed out my apron and picked up my water gourd and went to meet them.
“Here is water,” I called, the greeting we always used. I held the half-empty gourd out in front of me. “I’m sorry I don’t have more to offer.”
The monk who had gotten out of the litter waved it away, and some of the stiffness went out of my fingers.
“Thank you, little sister,” he said, “but we have no need of water.” I touched my forehead in thanks. He wore a fine, ochre-dyed cotton robe, and hammered gold earrings shaped like snakes pierced his ear lobes with their teeth. A necklace of jade plates rested on his chest. If he had wanted water, he could have demanded all I had, and more. But instead he reached into a leather sack he wore slung over one shoulder and pulled out a scroll of bark paper. It crinkled as he smoothed it out. A homesteader, and daughter of a homesteader, I had seen paper only once, and that was in the Great Hall of Terador when the empire took my father’s land and gave it to another family after he died. A monk had signed the paper for me with a quill from a crow’s wing. Homesteaders never learned how to write.
“You are Sadhann?” he asked. “Tenant of Camrae Farm?”
Bad luck when a monk calls you by name. I nodded and pulled the water gourd in tight against my stomach.
The monk smiled.
“Sadhann,” he said, still smiling, the light of his smile reaching gray-blue eyes the color of water never contaminated by dust. “Sadhann, we have come to bestow a wonderful revelation upon you. Five years ago you bore a child. And lo, that child will become the God of War. Give thanks!”
The gourd slipped from my fingers and all that precious water splashed on the monk’s good leather boots.
* * * *
They made me take them to the house, even though I told them Aria was a girl. Their eyebrows lifted just enough for me to tell they were surprised, despite their smiles. Women did not fight in wars. Sometimes, if they were rich and lucky, they learned to weave beautiful tapestries and even to read and write. But daughters of homesteaders hoed pumpkins and tended corn and lived their lives dust to dust. After I told the monks that Aria was a girl, I could see in their eyes what they thought: that I was a dirt-woman, trying hard to keep her only son by lying about his sex.
“The proclamation states that the War God wishes your child to become his new avatar,” the Senior said. “The form he currently inhabits grows old, and he needs a new body. A young body. So we will go see this girl.”
It was common knowledge even out here that some of the gods of the Itarran Tribunal grew old and sought new hosts. We gossiped about it when we met, the way we gossiped about the weather. But I had never thought a god would touch me or my child.
I led them down the path home, through stands of sick green bluestem higher than our heads. The monks had nothing to say to a dirt-woman, even if she was the mother of the War Goddess. Their boots crunched on the hard, dry soil. The wind swirled it up around us and rustled the grass. Ordinary sounds, but there was nothing ordinary about that day.
The grass ended suddenly at the bounds of a circle of scorched earth, our only defense against fire. The house itself was built into a gentle roll in the land, its roof curved and green with plants. It looked like a turtle, the kind that buried themselves in the mud down in the wash. Jaren and I had dug up bricks of turf to build our house and seed shed ourselves, a year before Aria was born. For the past six years, the roots that grew down through the walls had held them solid and tight, but now the house was drying out like the rest of the prairie. Sometimes at night our roof trickled down on us like water. Jaren’s spade lay forgotten atop the house, where he’d been packing new sod into the holes left by the crumbling old bricks. He stood in the doorway, wiping his dirt-blackened hands on a rag.
Aria put down her cornshuck dolls and greeted me with a wilted handful of blue forget-me-nots. “Here, Mama,” she said. “For you.”
Forget-me-nots were Aria’s favorite flowers. They grew in a small patch that straggled along the lip of the roof, where it hung down low on one side of the house. It was a miracle they were still alive in this drought.
I took the sick forget-me-nots in one hand and her hand in the other. Jaren came to stand beside us, tucking the rag into his belt. Aria pressed herself against my leg and watched the monks from halfway behind me.
“What’s this?” Jaren asked. In the afternoon sun, his dark hair shone just like Aria’s, like the polished wood of the monk’s litter. My heart hurt to see it.
“This is Aria,” I told the monk.
My husband gave me a mute look. The Senior walked hesitantly toward us, and Jaren took Aria’s other hand in his. Aria blinked up at the monk with those wide brown eyes that had always seemed too old for her face.
The monk carefully lowered himself to one knee in front of her.
“You’re going to take me away,” she said. “Aren’t you.”
“Did your father tell you that, little one?”
Aria shook her head. “No. I just knew.” She scuffed her toe in the dirt and watched the marks it made for a while. Then she said, “Can Papa and Mama come too?”
The monk touched her shoulder. “You will be going to meet your true self. Your true self has no papa and mama.”
Aria sighed. “But they’ll be lonely without me.”
“They’ll be proud of you.”
Aria bent her head back to look up at us, and I wanted to smile at her but couldn’t. I wanted to grab her from the monk’s uncallused white hands and draw her to me, to feel the heat of her sun-warmed hair under my hand and hear myself say, No, you can’t have her, she’s mine, she’s all I have. I saw myself getting up in the morning and making breakfast without her putting her fingers in the pot before it had even cooled, and I saw myself coming in from the fields to find her dolls sitting neatly on her bed, alone. I saw myself not having to scold her when she ran naked and laughing out into the sun because it was summer.
I should have torn her away from the monk.
But I didn’t. I stood there frozen with Jaren, who gripped her other hand so tightly it turned white. We both watched as Aria slowly shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I think they’ll be lonely. I want them to come.”
The monk frowned. “Aria, the God of War has no parents.”
Jaren jerked, and I remembered that he didn’t know what this was all about. “But she’s only a girl!”
The monk’s frown hardened and the color of his eyes looked less like water than stone. “Do you dare question the Tribunal? The God of War has chosen this girl as his new form—give thanks and be proud!”
Jaren made a strangled sound deep in his throat.
The monk unrolled his scroll again and began to read from it. “The God of War speaks thus:
“’Walk upon the Western Road, my faithful ones, walk until your feet gather sores and stones and your eyes ache from dust. Bear this in my name, for I grow tired of this body and desire another, a child who lives far, far from Itarra in the province of Reddis, amid fields of corn and pumpkins and prairie grass, in a place called Camrae. This child’s father is called Jaren and its mother Sadhann, and this child will be one with me, my new body. In this body I will vanquish all those who challenge our borders and I will trample their bodies to dust beneath my boots.’”