And suddenly, without warning, that great head turned like an opening door and the black Mare bit into the flesh of my shoulder with blazing teeth, tearing muscle from bone. I screamed uselessly into the echoes, and blood surged from the wound like a river through a red canyon, gushing warmly onto my breasts and hands. I flailed against her, beating her flank with my fists, but the teeth only ground harder into me. I think I must have fainted then, and as I fell against her body I expected nothing but death.
When I came around I lay once more against the rock wall, drenched in my own blood as though I had been caught in a rainstorm. The Mare had disappeared. I wept bitterly—though she had sunk her teeth in me I missed them, I felt empty without their light burning into me. She had done no more than she had always done—chewed a hole in flesh. And the edges of her hole longed for her, after she was gone. Her absence filled the chamber like a voice.
In her place was a much smaller creature, not at all commanding or terrible, sitting on its haunches, eyes sparking in the returned blackness. When it saw I had revived, it padded across the earthen floor and stood directly in front of my face; a handsome red Fox with a splendid furry tail. He smelled of burnt grass and copper filings, and his fur crackled with a baleful kind of rusted light.
To my surprise, he bent his inquisitive head and began licking the blood from my wound. He closed his polished eyes as he worked, long, rough passes with his pink tongue, prickling and horribly painful. I bit my lip and did not whimper, though the brush of his fur against my tortured skin was agony. Slowly the scarlet ebbed from the pale. But he was not finished with me. The little Fox opened his mouth and spoke quite clearly.
“Press some of the goldenseal and dandelion root from your pack into the wound, then use bay leaves to bind the poultice. It will help. But it is important that you do not stop the blood flow entirely. My mother has prepared you, but you will need the blood of your body.”
I obeyed numbly. When I had finished, the Fox bent to sniff at my shoulder and check my work. I watched him carefully, and as he inclined his head I lashed out and gripped his bristling throat in my fist. Through his struggles against my strong hands and his snapping snout trying to reach me, I hissed at him through my own sharp teeth.
“Now, tell me what is going on here, Fox, or I shall have you skinned and in my pack with the bay and the dandelion faster than a lion can swallow a mouse.”
The Fox snorted and sputtered like a petulant child, and after some sniffling and snorting, and after realizing I would not let his neck out of my hands, replied with injured dignity:
“You, little girl, are not supposed to touch me, you are not supposed to assault me or ask me questions. It is not done. But you touched the Mare, and that too is forbidden. I can only hope the pain of her bite was extreme. That she endured your hands on her! Filthy! They are so dirty, you are so dirty and dark, and you touched her, you touched me!”
I let him go carefully, moving backwards from his furious form as he rubbed his nose and his throat and washed his fur with desperate strokes of a pink tongue. I smiled with what I assumed was bravery and nodded with what I imagined to be a casual air. “Fox, I think I have been good, and suffered quite enough to know what is happening to me in this place.”
The Fox hooted in derision, a strange noise coming from his delicate russet snout.
“Oh, you think you have been good, do you? You think you have suffered? You know nothing at all, stupid as a goat.” He drew himself up on his haunches. “I am the Servant of the Black Mare. That was my mother you fondled, wicked child. She who invented words, and yet does not speak; she who brings dreams and visions, yet does not sleep; she who swallows the storm, yet knows nothing of rain or wind. I speak for her; I am her own. This was not your test, human child; that lies beyond. Pain is no test. In my mind you have already failed; you dared touch her who carries the Moon in her Belly, who foaled the Stars in the Beginning of the World. But she allowed your unclean hands on her, and still blessed you with her sacred Teeth, so there must be something in you which was born in her.”
The Fox pawed the earth fretfully, imploring me with his eyes. “Why did you do it? Why did you have to stroke her as though she were your mount, your little pet? Oh mother mine, would you have ridden her? Even… even I have never been permitted to touch her, in all my years of service, never once… Terrible child, why could you not have kept your hands to yourself?”
The Fox trotted towards me again. In a crimson flash he cruelly raked his claws across my left breast, splitting the flesh like a ripe plum. I could have sworn there were tears in his little black eyes, catching in his golden fur and whiskers.
“There,” he snarled, “that is for your trespass; that is my mark. I am the Servant! I walk alongside the Mare; I have drunk her milk and hunted with her! I chewed the tiny Grass-Stars in their hundreds and thousands by her side! And I will not heal that one for you!”
I breathed hard, genuinely afraid now of the little animal, his hackles high, both of us panting in the dark. I clasped a hand over my new wound, blood dripping through the sieve of my fingers. The Fox seemed to compose himself, his fur returning to its usual sleekness.
“I have wasted half your time already, idiot girl.” His eyes glazed over, retreating into ritual. “But you will not pass your tests, so it hardly matters. Go further in, filth-child, into the second chamber, which is the Wolf Cave, and from there to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. There lies your test. Pass these chambers and emerge a woman. Or die within them. Remember, pain is not a test. Knowledge is not enough. Many have gone before you, little one, and none have ever spoken of their trials. It is forbidden. You may take nothing but your own body; your pack must stay here. Go, with the blessing of the Mare, and acquit yourself as well as a brat like you can.”
With that, the Fox snapped his needle jaws once in my direction and walked towards the far end of the cavern, right through the stone wall, disappearing as though he never was. I was still bleeding, and though a few of the leaves and powders from my pack helped, there was a dark stain on my dress. I smoothed my hair and stood, firmer now, looking for the entrance into the second chamber. And of course, where the Fox had vanished with a flourish of his beautiful tail, there was now a small hole low in the rock, the color of fresh blood, hardly big enough for me to squeeze through. I walked towards it, trying to tell myself that I was at ease, serene as the moon on a crane’s feathers.
The girl closed her large eyes as she spoke, so that her eyelids and their mosaic covering seemed to float like black lilies in the paleness of her face. Frogs sent emerald notes up into the air, and owls sang in low gleaming strands, resting in black branches, veiled in the violet breath of jacaranda flowers. Under their harmonics, her voice sighed back and forth. The girl drank from the wine flask, running her fingers over its engraved surface. The wind rustled her hair like petals on a lake.
Even though they had rested, as she spoke the boy had again drifted into a shallow sleep, and the story’s words wove in and out of his mind like a needle drawing silken thread. His head lay on the girl’s lap, and she stroked his soft black hair as she continued, at first timidly, then with a growing tenderness. The stars overhead burned like court candles. The moon was high, full as a blown sail, riding softly through the rolling blue clouds, cutting through their foamy sapphirine flesh with a glowing prow. Shadows fell in long minarets on the gardens, the courtyards, the lemon trees and olive, the acacias and the climbing vines, the bone white lilies and the sleeping Palace. The girl’s voice was like river rushes rubbing together in a warm wind, winding through the cobbled paths.
I CROUCHED AND WRIGGLED INTO THE HOLE, into the slick rock, which became mud as quickly as ice becomes water. On my belly I dug into the earth like a worm—I could barely breathe for the dripping dirt; I could barely move for the press of the slippery cave. I told myself I was not afraid of dirt, dirt is dirt, and holes always empty out somewhere. I told myself that while dirt which was only dirt slithered into my mouth and my nose and my eyes, and all I could taste was earth, and I could see nothing at all.
But I emerged—you always emerge, eventually—on the other side, into another cavern with another earthen floor. It was too dark to see the other side, the rock walls narrowing upwards into a skinny crack through which I could see the cascading moonlight and hear the fall of a soft rain somewhere in the distance.
I should have known, I should have known from the moment my foot touched the cave floor. I could hear a storm terribly far off, the drip of water off thick pine needles and the drinking grasses, the sucking mushrooms, the soggy moss. It rang in my ears like bells on a horse’s saddle, the silver, slight glistening of rain on fat green leaves, and the slippery smell of damp, rotting flowers. But the haunch of sky I saw through the opening in the cave-roof showed a clear night, full of hard, bright stars.
The rain fell in some place so far off that it did not even disturb the air above me. But my ears and my nose struck on it, like a blade sparking under a hammer. I trotted quickly around the dim room, examining and investigating, trying to sniff out the test before it leapt out at me. I should have known—but it felt so natural to press a wet nose into the corners of the rock, to canter and bristle and snap my jaws togeth
er in the dark.
I looked for a second door, but there was nothing, though one side of the rock face was curiously polished, a deep amber color that reflected the room and the moonlight—and me. I saw a flash of gray and white as I passed it, and stopped suddenly, my heart spinning around in my throat. I saw my image in the stone.
Staring dumbfounded at me from the shining cave wall was a very large and very handsome gray wolf. Great shaggy ears twitched, and my tongue lolled between frighteningly fierce teeth. My eyes sparkled black and my fur was the shade of shadows cast on water by the moon, starry-white and silver, every shimmer of silver from stone to snow, glossy and pale over powerful legs, down to the tip of my extremely long and proud tail, which I thumped grandly on the earthen floor.
All in all, my granddaughter, I looked very fine. I howled just to hear it, bouncing off the walls like an arrow of green wood. It was so loud I jumped at my own voice. Yet I was still alone in the room. I trotted back and forth as though I had never had to manage with only two legs. Nothing was more natural than my new loping gait, the balance of my tail, the catch of my claws on hidden roots and rocks. I padded around on my new paws, the quick thud of them quickly replacing the ridiculous idea that I had ever been a girl and slept in a soft bed. My thoughts became wolfish, itching to be released into the night to hunt and run with these strong limbs over the fields. My heart was flooded with the memory of bounding through feathery snow with my pack, nursing my beautiful gray pups in a warm den, tracking hares and deer over green mountains, prowling through farms filled with fat pigs and helpless spring lambs; wordless and fierce, without the endless sweeping of huts and hearths. But then—what is a hut? What is a hearth? It became terribly difficult even to remember my name, and then to remember that I had one, and then to remember what a name was. It was like going to sleep, covering myself in a warm blanket which was a body, and I was so tired, you know, so tired.
You must understand, Knife-of-my-heart, how the thing that changed me takes the mind as well as the body, how it swallows up everything into itself.
But as that night seemed to trickle by and nothing at all happened, I curled into a ball of gleaming fur in the center of the cave and fell asleep, lost in the blackness of endless night and dreams of hunting and eating, always eating.