Gradually the water in the jar sank lower. Occasionally I ate a handful of dried apricots or some walnuts but I had no appetite. My grief for Swan curdled my stomach, and slowed my heartbeat. Occasionally I refilled the oil in my lamp; its flames rose and fell, illuminating all that there was to see: the funeral chariot, the coffin, the horses’ bones. I removed the golden torc that Berta had given me, and laid it on the altar as a gift, and begged the dead warrior priestess to wear it in her afterlife and to forgive me. Sometimes I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped that when I opened them again I would find I had been trapped in a dark dream and that around me I would see my own familiar room in our house in Ershi. But this never happened. My mind plodded along, dull and slow, or roused itself into fits of fear and panic, scrabbling inside my skull like a marmot in a snare. When this happened, I would tell myself stories to calm my mind. I told myself about Bucephalus, the great Persian horse that had belonged to Alexander the Great, a conqueror who had ridden through our lands centuries ago.
