The Foretelling by Alice Hoffman Page B

strength. We dined together and then I asked for the Black Horse, Anto.
    I told you he was too weak to live,
Deborah said.
    My face must have betrayed me because she laughed.
    But I made him strong. He's in his place.
    Anto was in his nook in the wall, bundled in a blanket. I could hear him making noises, more like a dove than a horse. When I reached for him, he looked at me carefully with his yellow eyes. He was staring at me as though he knew me, perhaps from another life, perhaps from a world-to-be.
    Deborah was weaker than ever, but she dragged herself over. She sat beside me as I held the baby.
Mares’ milk can make a baby into a king,
Deborah said, considering what we'd done.
    They want me to kill him. And he's a baby now. Nothing more.
    That's what I did to mine.
I looked at Deborah, but she didn't seem to notice.
When I had a son I had no choice. It was our way.
    The priestess was shaking with the tremor of old age, but also with something more.
    It still is,
I said.
    Is it?
    I looked at Deborah and saw the girl she had been, long before she became a priestess, when her hair was black and reached to the earth. He had been her first child, this son of hers, there in the time when she had no choice. She said she'd done it gently, not the way other women did, leaving baby boys on the steppes for the wolves and the ravens. She'd covered his face and sang to him. She'd been with him when his spirit went on. Even still, she dreamed of him every night.
    It may still be our way, but don't all ways change, for bad and for good?
the priestess asked me.
Take a single arrowhead from those scattered around your mother. That will be the foretelling. It will show you the way.
    I thought about my own dreams, how in that deep nightworld it was always my duty to run with the Black Horse, not to trap or kill him. I held my brother close. He smelled like mares’ milk and horses. Just a baby. He studied my face. Maybe he was surprised to see yellow eyes, so much like his.
    I thought if there was anyone who could tell me what to do it was my mother. I rode to the catacombs, to the secret entrance, and moved away enough rocks to fit through into the chamberway. Since it was pitch-black I took a torch with me; even with the torch, I could hardly remember the way to my mother's resting place. Straight, and then two turns, Deborah had told me, but I circled, lost.
    It was hushed and freezing cold beneath the earth. At last I came to the place of my great-grandmother, the Queen who had first spoken to horses. I crept over the rocks that kept my great-grandmother safe from prowlers, then I got down on my knees and sang to her. The bones of her beloved horse had been buried with her, and five other horses as well. The blankets she'd been wrapped in had all been dyed a deep blue, the color of our people. I took the leather pouch from around my waist and took the bear's teeth to leave for her, all but the one I wore around my neck.
    Thank you,
I said to my great-grandmother.
For speaking to horses, for being my grandmother, for showing me the way.
    I climbed back past the rocks and went on until I found my mother. The earth was streaked dark and light outside her resting place, as if Penthe's tears had reached here. I thought of the look on my mother's face that day when I brought her the priestess's herbs, how frightened she'd been, and I did not blame her for naming me Rain or for turning away from me.
    If I don't deserve to be the Queen, then I will go away,
I told my mother.
I will respect your wishes.
    I waited there for a long while, hoping she would send me a message from the next world. I sang to her, the song Io had taught me, whose words I still didn't understand. I liked how comforting it was. I liked the sound of it, sister to sister, daughter to mother.
    The blankets around the Queen were made of felt, the finest ever made, dyed blue in the way of our people. I took one of the arrowheads that had belonged to my mother, as Deborah had