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her prow set toward open water. The motion caught me sick, as it did the horses, who now in alarm evacuated bowels and bladders, sending this broth in cascades onto their footing timbers and through these to the bilges.
    Heaven preserve us, the ships had launched.
    We were on the sea.

4
    DAUGHTERS OF THE HORSE
    Selene’s testament:

    I was born not in Amazon country but ten days north, among the Black Scythians. These are not black-skinned, as Ethiopians, but black-maned; fierce fighters, women as well as men. My mother was Cymene, daughter of Prothoe, who had dueled Heracles hand-to-hand and been slain by him before the Typhon’s Gate of Themiscyra, capital of Amazonia. Mother could speak Pelasgian and Aeolian Greek, and wished me to learn for the free people’s sake, though among our race speech, and its handmaiden, reason, are considered stages of degeneration, inferior to action and example, which is the language of
Ehal
, Nature, and of God. Among my people speech is parsed; even infants babble little, rather are schooled to make themselves known as horses and hawks, without sound. It has been my disfigurement, for my race’s weal, to have learned letters among civilized society. This art has severed me from God and from the free people.
    Men say God made the sky. This is mistaken. God
is
the sky, for creation may not stand apart from Creator, but all that is, is, and is God. First from the sky issued the thunderbolt and the hailstorm; for a hundred times a hundred thousand winters these reigned, solitary. Then came eagle, and falcon, and all creatures of the air. These lived a thousand millennia, never touching earth, for she had not been made, but dwelt happily upon the air and within it, which itself was all their sustenance, of food and spirit. They were a part of God and were God.
    Sky craved communion and brought into form Earth, our mother, charging her with his bolts of fire and cleaving her belly to bear ocean and mountains and inland sea. All these were great and holy and were a part of God and were God.
    From Sky came Horse. In the beginning Horse flew, more swiftly than the eagle, and in fact was called by God “steppe eagle,” as she is to this day by the free people. Horse was first to form societies. Before Horse’s coming each creature dwelt apart and solitary, in communion only with God and Earth. Horse invented language. Her tongue was holy, God’s own idiom, which speaks in silence, without even the cast of an eye or flick of a mane. This language yet endures, but may be heard by humankind only within the stern clash of battle.

    Hear, O People, the peal
    of God’s sacred tongue, resounding alone
    atop Ares’ anvil, hammered into hearing
    by the mawl of valor.

    When humankind appeared, they were weak and puny. Horse nursed them on mare’s milk and blood, and raised them as her own. Horse led the clans to water when thirst parched the plains and to vales of fruit and forage when famine bore them hard. When swift fire raced across the steppe, horse commanded the people, Leap upon my back; and bore them at the gallop to safety. Horse taught them to hunt the shy hart and the wild oryx, the mountain eland and the gazelle. And when grim famine stalked the land, Horse instructed the people: Eat of my flesh and live. Without these boons and others numerous as the lamps of heaven, the race of mortals would have perished a thousand times over. Always Horse preserved them. And when the free people in thanksgiving sought to make sacrifice to God, they offered up that which they revered and venerated beyond all, their savior and ally, Mother Horse.
    Horse taught the free people her ways, to ride and raid; she schooled them to bear winter’s hardship and summer’s travail. Her flesh she donated in every part, from the casings of her organs, with which the free people bore water, to her sinew for bowstrings, her gut to stitch wounds. From her mane the free people