“I think she must have been very beautiful,” she whispered. “I wonder what happened to her. It makes you think, doesn’t it, Taras? That you’re not the only girl with problems in this world. I mean, look at her. Did she just die of some illness, perhaps? Or was she killed, like her horses? In battle by her enemies? I don’t suppose we shall ever know for sure what happened to her, but I should like to have known her.”
Kalinka bowed her head in respect for the little warrior priestess for a moment.
“Dear lady, you are not forgotten,” she said quietly.
Temüjin and Börte were still sniffing at the skeletons, as if they wanted to make quite sure that they were dead.
“I’m sorry,” Kalinka said to them. “This must be very upsetting for you both. To see so many of your kind in a mass grave like this. I’d like to apologize to you on behalf of humankind, in general. I may be just a child with little experience of the world, but it seems that people are capable of great cruelty, not just to animals but also to each other. You hear all sorts of terrible stories these days. I even heard tell of people in the south who were so hungry, they ate their own children. Max is right; I don’t think it does any good to hate. But you can’t help feeling more than a little disappointed now and again that man is such a destructive species. I don’t suppose the priestess would have allowed them to do such a terrible thing as kill all these horses if she’d been alive. I know I would certainly have forbidden it.”
Taras barked and sat down. The ancient burial chamber made him feel uneasy—he sensed that there were ancient forces at work in the ancient tomb, and he thought there could be little chance of sleeping comfortably in such a place. But for the moment, there seemed to be no other place that they could go.
“I hope she won’t mind us disturbing her grave like this,” said Kalinka. “Then again, what can she do?”
Taras barked and let the bark turn into a sort of whine—he sensed that there was a lot more the dead warrior priestess could have done about their presence there than evidently Kalinka suspected, and already he half expected to see or feel a ghost. Max might not have believed in ghosts and spirits, but like most dogs, Taras was much less skeptical about such things. Besides, there was a lot more to being a spirit than appearing in the form of an apparition or going bump in the night. Spirits could affect what people did, and sometimes they could even take them over. How else could you explain someone like Captain Grenzmann, who was possessed with the idea of his own countrymen’s superiority over all other peoples?
Kalinka had wandered off with one of the lamps to explore.
“There’s everything here that you could want if you were a warrior priestess,” she said. “Armor, weapons, even a chariot—all perfectly preserved. Who knows? Perhaps she could have helped us fight the Germans. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she could have defeated them, too. I mean, just look at the blades on the wheels of this chariot. And her bow and arrows on the side of the platform. I’ll bet she was pretty formidable in her day. I’m sure some of those jars must contain food and drink, although I’m not going to risk it—not after all this time. Even though I’m very hungry.”
She opened one of the jars anyway and put her fingers inside it experimentally.
“Actually, it’s not food in this jar,” she said. “It seems to be what looks like a sort of paint. Silver paint. I could have used some of this back at Askaniya-Nova. For the walls of our cave. I might have painted some silver horses. What do you think about that, Taras?”
Taras yawned. All of a sudden, he felt as if he could sleep after all; was there something in that strange-smelling animal fat burning in the censer that was making him feel as if he could not stay awake a minute longer? Or was it just the sense that they were safe after all—at least for a while?
Börte lay down with a sigh and closed her eyes. Temüjin went to inspect the chariot, but only as a way of staving off tiredness. He, too, wanted to lie down and sleep.
“Well, I don’t know about all of you,” said Kalinka, “but I am going to get some sleep. Let’s hope that the Germans don’t find this place. I don’t suppose there’s any way out of here other than the way we came in.”
Kalinka lay down next to Börte and laid an arm across the horse’s neck as if the animal were a teddy bear; she told herself that a living, breathing horse was much more comforting to sleep with than some smelly old stuffed toy.
Temüjin lay down beside the old chariot; he flicked his furry tail a couple of times and closed his dark eyes. He could not explain why he trusted the girl and believed at the core of his being that she could help save his species, any more than he could account for how he had known that the ancient stone circle should have concealed a place of holy sanctuary for them; but he did and he had, and that was all the reason that was needed for a creature such as him. He liked the girl even more for what she had said about her own kind.