A Cold Wind

Late at night, she sleeps curled by the fireplace with her wings folded tight along her back. She won’t sleep in the bed with me, afterward. She’ll rise and stretch, and settle on the woven hearthrug like a dog, with the firelight washing red and gold over her skin.

Tonight I can’t sleep, though. Got too many awkward thoughts running through my head, like: does she love me? Will she leave for good one day? And, how can I make her stay?

There’s no place to go with notions like that. She comes when she comes, and goes when she chooses, and all I can do is be grateful for the times she does come slipping cool like moonlight through the sliding glass doors and into my arms.

I click the TV on, damping the sound so I don’t wake her. Late night news blooms across the screen, fire and screams and sooty dark faces twisted with weeping, and I don’t need to raise the volume.

I know those sounds; they’re in my head, I hear them again and again in the dark of the night, for all I’m half a world away. I can recite the anchorwoman’s words by heart: renewed airstrikes pound insurgent strongholds in the south; warplane down, hospital got bombed, uncounted civilian deaths . . .

And I remember: heat like an anvil on my back in the heavy street armor, the reek of ripe vegetables and live chickens in the marketplace and the chatter in Pashto all around me just before the bomb goes off and it all goes black. Months of surgeries and therapies and a shiny new leg; then I’m back in the world with a pension to feed me -- and a hole in the soul too big for anything to fill.

Until she came.

My fingers tighten on the remote, punching the volume button hard. Her eyes snap open at the sudden blare.

She’s on her feet before I can blink, reaching for her leathers and her boots. She stares at the screen, awash with images of contorted faces and columns of smoke, and her face comes alight with a wild bright joy.

“It’s time,” she says.

“Tine for what?” I blurt.

She dresses fast: leather jacket and khaki pants, white T-shirt and heavy lace up boots. By some magic the wings emerge from the back of her jacket; they flex absently as she buckles her belt. She checks the knives in their sheaths and frowns at me.

“Go to sleep. This is not for you.” She jerks her head at the TV. “The world is burning. Can’t you feel it? Time to go. I have work to do.”

Questions crowd my mind, questions I don’t dare to ask, for fear the asking would drive her from me. So I sit there on the couch, tongue-tied with my heart hammering, all the fear of losing her freezing my limbs.

“Where are you going? What do you have to do – out there?” I wave a hand at the blackness beyond the patio doors.

“You’ve always been asleep, before.” She gathers her hair, white as smoke and moonbeams, into a long whiplash braid.

“Not any more,” I say. “I don’t want to lose a minute of you.”

Her mouth twists, only half a smile. She glances up, and then I hear it too: a rising wind, screaming like the fighter jets swooping low over Basra, and underneath, the thrumming beat of wings.

Then she sweeps aside the curtains and pulls the glass doors wide so the night pours in, and she steps out onto the patio.

“They’re here. I have to go.”

“Wait!” I scramble up from the cushions, grabbing the crutches I hardly use anymore, because if I take the time to put on my leg she’ll be gone, out to whatever’s waiting for her in the dark.

She holds up a hand. “No. You’re done. You made it through. It’s not your job, now.”

“Is it yours?” I stand up, swaying. A memory teases at me, tickling at my brain, déjà vu from the dreamtime of sedatives and pain, and the groaning of engines on the way to Germany.

“It’s always mine,” she says. “And theirs.”

A wind blows through the open doorway, icy as the breath of gods, and I step out with her onto the patio, where summer flowers tremble in the sudden cold.

Theirs. A trio of armored women astride satin skinned horses, spiraling down from the sky in a flurry of wings. I breathe in cold, the smell of blood and burning, a faint whiff of apples from her hair.

One of the riders drops down low, tossing the reins of a riderless black mare to her. She catches the reins one-handed, holds up the other: wait. The rider, ice-white face painted in blue and silver whorls, nods and looks the other way.

She turns back to me, and her eyes fill with tears.

“I walked the fields of Flanders, “ she says slowly. “And Waterloo, and Crimea. Culloden and Normandy. All those places where heroes die. I held their hands, and kissed them as they died. And then we took them home, my sisters and I, to the halls where heroes feast forever.”

She touches my face, her bird-bone fingers light as air, and suddenly, I remember.

Riding drugged and dazed through the night in the belly of that hospital plane, I’d thought I was dreaming. Among the smells of blood and antiseptics and metal, there was the scent of her hair. Over the noise of the engines and the crosstalk of the medics, the whisper of her voice in my ear.

Now she smiles. “We came that day, to gather you all. But they took you away, still living. Not long, I thought, and so I followed, to claim you when it was time.”

“But –“ I stammer, as her words sink in. “I didn’t -- ”

“No.” The mare stamps air, impatient, and behind her the other riders gather, treading the wind. “And so I came to find you. To claim you, living. For me.”

The wind cuts clear through my thin T-shirt but a slow heat spreads in my chest.

“I have to go,” she says. “The desert is burning. They’re dying now.” She grabs a fistful of the T-shirt and pulls me suddenly close. She kisses me hard, and the sharp teeth, that no human woman has, slice through my lower lip.

I taste blood. And I ask the stupid question.

“Will you come back? To me?”

She swings up onto the back of the wild-eyed mare, and her wings spread wide, like moonlight on her shoulders.

“Always.”

I raise a finger to the warm trickle on my chin. Then she turns the mare’s head to the sky, riding that cold cold wind that blows from Valhalla to here.

Behind the Scenes: This story began as a poem, inspired both by scenes emerging from the US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a song by the English rock group Jethro Tull, called "A Cold Wind to Valhalla." I like the idea that Valkyries are still on the job wherever heroes fall.