The Foretelling: A Novel by Alice Hoffman

Author:Alice Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504040075
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

In the House of

In the house of my mother it was too silent.

Winter had come and stayed for a very long time. The snow fell more deeply than anyone could remember. We were in the caves below the mountains. Asteria and Astella and their warriors had set their tents out in the open, to protect us, but soon even they had to come inside the caves. The world was dark and it was bright. Black inside, blinding white outside.

Our horses were kept in the pastureland below, but soon they could not move; they were trapped in the drifts. We had to go and chop away at the snow with axes, then hack through the icy stream so that they could drink. All through the cooling weather we had cut grass. Now we lined the caves with it, food for our sisters, warm beds for ourselves. But the food became less and less and we had to kill some of our own sister-horses, or they would have starved. We thanked their spirits as we ate them, as we sewed the clothes we made from them and braided together their long tail hair for thread.

Deborah and the priestesses were off by themselves in a small cave where we left offerings. Meat and milk they could warm on their fire. Blankets made of newly tanned horsehide. Every time I went to give the offerings, Deborah seemed smaller. In her black clothes she looked like a raven herself with her black eyes and her beak of a nose and all of those blue lines tattooed on her face that told the story of her life. She had been an archer once, and had burned off her left breast. She had been so young and beautiful men had wept at the sight of her. Now she was a raven waiting for me to bring her mares’ milk to drink.

Don’t you want your fortune told? she’d ask whenever I came to the cave.

We would both laugh then. A black joke we shared, for the augury was what I wanted least of all. My own fortune terrified me. My fate frightened me more than the high snowdrifts.

Don’t be afraid of the foretelling, she whispered. It’s the way the world should be.

We had brought the bees with us, and the caves buzzed from the logs in which they lived. At night, they beat their wings to keep the honey at the right temperature. It froze anyway, and many of the bees froze as well; those that remained went to sleep, as the bears do, as we try to do, outdistancing the winter with dreams.

Io and I still took care of the horses. We would cover ourselves with horsehide until we were sister-horses, unrecognizable as human beings, then we’d trudge through the snow with hay on our shoulders and in our hair. Now I realize that we were happy. Though we were freezing, though our stomachs growled. We would hold hands and spin around in the snow until we fell down.

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