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“Father,” she says. “What is the shape of the world?”
For a moment she wonders if he heard, as he does not look at her, and instead continues sharpening an arrowhead, each draw of his knife against the stone making a shing, shing sound like a goatherd’s bell. But finally he stops and sets his knife down and stares up into the cloud-speckled sky, humming thoughtfully.
“I think,” he says, “it must be a bowl.”
“… A bowl?”
“Yes.” He nods, a pensive set to his features. “A bowl that rests on the gods’ table, so that they may look into it and see their creations.”
She ponders this.
“But… Father, if the world were a bowl, would we not see the slope of its sides rising up in the distance?”
He blinks. Glances out at the line of the horizon, where the last few rays of sunlight are bleeding reddish-orange into the earth.
“You… are a very intelligent girl,” he says, clearing his throat awkwardly. “That is because it is an upside-down bowl.”
Refusing to meet her eyes, he returns once again to his whittling, and the young Scythian frowns.
C’mon, Pops, that’s some major BS, she almost says, but thinks better of it at the last second.
.
.
“Mother,” she says. “What is the shape of the world?”
Her mother pauses for a moment, glancing at her curiously, then sighs and shakes her head and continues with her stitching, pushing and pulling the thread with her sharp, quick hands. The bone needle glints in the hearthlight.
“Why do you ask such questions?” her mother says. “It does not matter, child. The shape of the world is of no importance to us.”
“But it is,” she insists. “When I leave on my journey someday, I will have to know! Or else I may travel too far and fall off the edge.”
“Your journey?” Mother laughs softly. “So the steppes are not enough for you? Land as far as the eye can see, and still you are not pleased?” She makes a quiet, exasperated sound that might be a plea to the gods to give her strength. “Where are you planning to journey to, exactly?”
“Everywhere! Grandmother says there is a place called the ‘sea,’ where all the rivers of the world join together. And a place called the ‘desert,’ where it never rains, and the earth is fine and coarse like it is on the bank of the stream, and the sun is always burning hot. And even,” here she lowers her voice to an almost-whisper, “a ‘city’ that is paved with gold, with towers that are far taller than trees and plants that grow and hang down from the sky.”
Mother shakes her head again. “You should not pay such mind to Grandmother’s stories, child. Most likely they are all made up, or at the very least embellished by the years. A city paved with gold…? Ridiculous…”
“But I know it’s true!” the young Scythian says, scowling. “Grandmother must have visited all those places! That’s how she knows. She told me about another place, too – a dark abyss beneath the mountains far west of here, guarded by a massive face made of stone. Can you imagine that? She said… that there is something in the darkness. Something that is not living, but neither is it dead. But she would not tell me its name no matter how much I asked. I wonder if it’s a ghost? Or maybe a god – ”
“That is enough,” her mother says, cutting her off. Her voice is trembling. She’s pale, lips pressed together in a thin line, knuckles white as she grips the needle. “You are not to listen to Grandmother’s stories anymore. Is that clear? Now go tend the sheep. You have dawdled away enough time as it is.”
The young Scythian’s scowl deepens, but she does as told, kicking at the dirt and grumbling to herself as she leaves the yurt.
(Parents, amirite? They just don’t understand.)
.
.
“Grandmother,” she says. “What is the shape of the world?”
The old woman looks over at her through a haze of pipe smoke. Her lips curve into a sly grin, revealing a mostly-toothless mouth.
Grandmother is not her grandmother by blood. She is no one’s real grandmother, as far as they know, as there is no one left alive in the tribe who remembers where she came from. She is darker than the rest of them, her skin creased and brown like an animal hide left out too long in the sun. She is stooped low, her back a strange, twisted thing, as if the wind on the plains has bent her like it does the stalks of grass. It is rare, to find anyone so old among the tribes. It is a harsh life, and most die long before their faces can become etched with weariness. But Grandmother… She persists. Often the young Scythian wonders if she is immortal.
And she knows things – about the world outside the steppes and the dark secrets of the gods. Things that not even the enarei speak of.
“The shape of the world?” Grandmother says. She laughs, and her laugh is hoarse and breathy. Like sawdust, the young Scythian thinks. “Why my dear, it is a disc, of course!”
“A… disc?”
Grandmother nods. “The world is a disc, round and thin like a piece of clay that has been rolled flat. It is constantly spinning, though we on its surface do not feel it. And at the end of existence, when all life has died out, the gods will take the disc of our world and turn it back to the very beginning, so that everything may begin again.”
“…Woah,” says the young Scythian, eyes gone wide as she tries to imagine it. “That’s hella rad.”
“That it is, my dear,” says Grandmother, with a smile that is crooked and sharp. She takes a puff of her pipe and the smoke seems to twine itself around her, writhing like a pair of snakes. “Do you want to know what lies on the other side of the disc?”
The young Scythian nods eagerly, and leans in closer without meaning to.
“It is the twilight realm of dreams, which is like a mirror to the world we know. They say that in the mountains to the west – which I have spoken of before, if you’ll recall – the two worlds are closer than anywhere else. So close that they almost overlap. And because of this the mountain people can walk freely through their dreams, and remember them plainly when they wake. They can even lose things there – not just objects, but also pieces of themselves. Some go to sleep and never rise again, unable to find their way back.”
“Why is it different there?” the young Scythian asks. “Why can the people there walk in dreams but we cannot?”
Grandmother raises an eyebrow. Though she often complains of failing vision, her gaze now is startlingly sharp.
“You already know the answer to that, do you not? Do not ask me to speak its name, child. That is one thing I will never do.”
Disappointed, the young Scythian falls silent, words of curiosity caught in her throat. (Everyone around her acting so dang inscrutable. It’s enough to drive a gal batty, that’s for sure.) She sighs and lies back in the grass and stares up at the sky, and thinks that the clouds today look strangely triangular, but when she blinks they are once again rounded and soft, just wisps of cotton floating across the endless blue.
.
.
In the north, Father says, there is a tribe that does not bury their dead.
Instead, they string the corpses up on tall wooden posts. The scavenger birds come and eat their flesh, and the rain and wind strip away the rest, until there is naught but a skeleton left behind, bones bleached an even more brilliant white by the sun.
The young Scythian does not expect to ever see one of these strange gravesites. The northern tribe keeps to themselves, mostly, rarely partaking in trade and caring little for warfare. They sequester themselves away in the cold lands and seldom venture further south. But one day, while on the hunt with her warrior brothers and sisters, she spies a strange, tall structure in the distance.
She urges her horse closer without thinking. She draws near and pulls on the reins to steady her mount, who seems oddly skittish and fearful of this place. He tosses his head and stomps his hooves, as if begging her to turn around.
The young Scythian stares up at the skeleton in equal parts fascination and horror, and the skeleton stares right back at her. Its eye sockets are so dark. The emptiness is boring into her. A shiver travels down the length of her spine, and she feels frightened, certainly. Wary. Heebie-jeebies like you would not BELIEVE, dude. But she also feels somehow… anticipatory. Something is waiting for her, but it is not here. It is far away, many leagues across the disc of the world, and she must go and find it. She must reach out and seize it with her own hands.
Her fingers flex at her side, and she wonders if it might be time to trade in her bow and arrows for a sword.