When Women Were Warriors Book I: The Warrior's Path

Lessons

Maara’s broken bones healed straight and strong, but the muscles of her arm had wasted from disuse. One day she took me out to the practice ground, just outside the earthworks. There we found shields made of wickerwork and wooden sticks like the toy swords children use in games.

She handed me a stick and a wicker shield and showed me how to hold them. Then she began to spar with me. At first I felt awkward, and the blows of her stick would send mine flying across the yard, but each time she showed me what I had done wrong, and before long I was doing much better.

Every day we spent several hours on the practice ground, sparring with sticks until her arm grew strong again. Then one day she put on her armor and buckled on her sword. She borrowed a leather cap and a heavy coat of sheepskin for me, as well as a real sword for me to practice with.

The sword was so heavy I had to hold it with both hands. After only a quarter of an hour I could no longer lift it, so she had me sit down and watch while she sparred with Eramet. The next morning I was stiff and sore, and I had so much trouble getting up from my bed that Maara offered me her hand. When she had me on my feet, she lifted my arm and examined it.

“You have the bones of a bird,” she said.

My disappointment that I would not be apprenticed came back to me all at once, so that I had to brush a tear from my eye before it spilled over and embarrassed me. She saw me and misunderstood.

“There’s no shame in that,” she said.

“I’m not ashamed,” I said. My face was hot. “Someday I will be a warrior, bird bones and all!”

Maara laughed at my anger. “Someday you’ll be what it’s in you to be. It does no good to argue with the gods about it.”

Every day she sparred with me, first with sticks and wicker shields, then with real swords, and every day I grew stronger, but I found it hard to believe that I would ever be strong enough to wield both sword and shield.

No one seemed to notice that my warrior was training me in swordplay. Because I wasn’t her apprentice, she had no obligation to teach me. I wondered why no one commented on it. I didn’t understand then that a warrior would do with her companion what seemed best to her, and no one would think to interfere.

§ § §

While Maara recovered from her injuries, the two of us were left alone to do as we pleased. Summer’s heat made Merin’s house too hot to sleep in, and after a few days of stifling weather, Maara told me to get ready to go out into the countryside. Sparrow showed me how to prepare a pack with the things we’d need—oil and flour for baking camp bread, dried meat and fruit, a round of cheese, water skins, a small tin pot, a scrap of blanket, a flint knife, firestones.

We traveled south along the river. It was my first chance to explore Merin’s land since I made the journey with my mother. The fields that had been only bare earth then were now thick with growing grain, still green, with the heads just forming.

The country people were generous with us. When they saw us on the road, women came out of their kitchens with loaves of bread, warm from the oven. They pressed upon us jars of milk and little baskets with a few duck eggs wrapped in straw.

My warrior said not a word to them. It was up to me to thank them, but they didn’t seem to mind her. They gave her sidelong glances, coy as maidens at the springtime festival.

When thunderstorms brought an end to the hot weather, we went back to Merin’s house for a while, but Maara much preferred to live outdoors, and she took me out on expeditions whenever we could get away. Sometimes we explored the settled land along the river. More often we camped high up in the hills east of the valley. She taught me to make snares and fish traps, and we lived very well on the game and fish we caught, and on flat, round loaves baked in the ashes of our campfire.