The Foretelling by Alice Hoffman Page A

She saw the look on my face as I studied the fire. Deborah motioned to me to come to her. You can never deny a priestess anything, and I should have gone to her, but instead I grabbed Io's hand and ran away.
    You can't be afraid of the fire,
Io teased me.
What did you see there? A spirit? A demon?
    I didn't say that it was myself that I saw in that fire. I was there, in every blue flame, riding away, farther than I'd ever gone before, alone.
    Are you sorry you re not going?
Io asked me later, when the sky was turning dark. We were in our tent, under our blanket, when the festival began, but we could hear them. There was drumming and what sounded like war cries. It was the mystery of the goddess that was being revealed, but I didn't want to see it.
    The men had already been taken to the priestesses and given a mixture of koumiss and hemp. By now they probably thought they were dreaming. They would not protest as they were dressed up like stags by the old women. Each man would wear the pelt of a stag, and a headdress with long horns. Their faces would be painted with ochre and yellow dust until they themselves wouldn't know who they were.
    Against my back, Io shivered.
    Will they kill them?
she asked me.
    When they're done with them, most likely.
    Some men were set free, some were kept, like the smith we had among us. There were people who believed that the bear in the sky was made up of the skulls of seven smiths, killed by our grandmothers, but still watching over us. It was a cruel time, and we knew that; still, we had to go on, otherwise our people would disappear, like a drop of blood on the earth, vanishing into the yellow clay.
    We could hear the wild songs in our dreams. Our people were drinking mares’ milk and taking out their carved pipes to smoke hemp; they had covered their bodies with a paste made out of the red flowers that grew on the steppes. They were dreaming, too, only they were still awake. It was the trance state, for one and all. It was the way we had always done things. It was for the sake of our daughters-to-be.
    This was the way our people were made, daughters formed from battle and joy, not from sorrow, the way I had been. As for the men, they thought they were in heaven, a deep heaven of dreams they had never imagined. Our people were upon them, not with weapons this time, but with their own bodies, covered with ochre and honey.
    My dreams were different. In my tent, I was dreaming of the black horse. I was running beside it, through the snow. I could feel my own breath, the billow of heat in the frozen air. I could hear the horse, his hooves, his breath. I reached him and grabbed his mane, then lifted myself up. There was a pounding in my head, the echo of horses’ hooves.
Wait for me, brother,
I said to the horse, but he was too fast and he threw me and in my dream I was falling.
    I awoke falling, startled, and in her sleep, Io held on to me. But it wasn't enough. My dream felt more real than my own tent. I went outside, into the cold morning. I could indeed see my breath in the air. It was so quiet, there weren't even any birds. I could smell last night's fires burning out and the odor of hemp. It looked as though a battle had been fought right here in our city. There were women sleeping outside, unprotected from the cold, still in the last grip of their trance. I saw two men, far on the steppe, wearing nothing, running like deer. The others I didn't want to see.
    I thought I saw my mother among the women who had been to the festival, but that was impossible. She already had her daughter, her Queen-to-be.
    But if I was to be the Queen, why was it that I wanted to be gone from this place? Why was I thinking of the grass that grew so tall, the hillock above Melek's city of tents?
    I took my horse and rode north. I rode for the sake of riding, to be my mare's sister, but there was something more in what I did. I knew that when I passed the place where Usha had been killed. Where her blood had seeped