The harvest became an offering to the war gods. Young women, roped and gagged. Many times, it happens like this. From fruit trees’ branches or curled about her ankles, the cat stares through her with its milky eye. Its other eye, half scab, half absence, stares at her too. Then the tragedy.

“Your death will come with fire,” she weeps to her robust grandfather, and without speaking, he places around her neck his silver amulet—Saint Michael sashed in silk with glinting sword. The following day, uniformed men come out of the jungle, the trees behind them in flames.

Tugging at his shirt and forcing words between sobs and frantic breaths, she knows her father will not hear. Unfaithed by city whores, and nursing cheap gin, he still suspects his own father’s spirit will make visitation upon him. A wisp of old man floating at the foot of the bed, blessing the blisters of his feet with touch.

CALL IT TALISMAN (IF YOU MUST)

1.

Here, the blind old man tapped this marking into my left arm and breastbone. He used his tapping stick and his sharpened irons. These are leaves and grass blades. These are sunbursts of flower petals, the flitting eyes of moth wings and cicadas. This here, the seer and her seeing stones. The glass eye with which she viewed the heavens. Above her mountain village, the stars arranged into hunter and bow, arrow aimed at mighty Lawin.

This is not thunder. No, only men are marked with thunder. He marked my flesh with the swirls of our village stream. Here, on my right shoulder. What I see is no stream, but a blade which women conceal beneath their skirts. Even today, we do this, though it is not proper, the elders say, for women to be marked for war.

It is no secret. Women did indeed fight alongside the men once. Few talk about it these days. The black-robed holy men, who carried more curses than prayer, so feared armed women, they branded us savage and sinful, they called us monsters. Women who tucked skirts between their legs, tongues of knives, hands like tilling tools, we returned home to nurse our babies after washing clean our bloodied hands.

2.

No, daughter, these are no talismans upon my flesh. The blind old man wished to give me markings in the patterns of my father’s fields, for he walked my father’s lands, from new growth’s edges to the greenest center, every sunrise in wordless prayer. Many years, he did this, never once opening his eyes. But by the time I grew old enough to marry, all his fields my father lost to the fire, and to the papers of the wealthy, not of this land but of gray cities far away from here.