Once upon a time there was a quiet young woman who liked to ride horses, named Leora. Leora lived in a mountain-perched village in which all the men had gone to war, so the whole town was filled with bustling, busy, bossy women. Leora often felt like hiding away from all those women and their confident directives, so she went to the forest beyond the village well, past the shared village pasture, and down through the border of the high pass into the valley.
This valley rarely saw straight sunlight. The mountains were so steep, and the trees so dense, that if a scrap of sunlight managed to wend its way through the trees and find the earth, it had turned a queer green color, and sparkled slowly like thick honey poured from a great height.
Leora would ride among the green syrupy light on her horse. She could not gallop here; the undergrowth was too thick. And she had to duck constantly under branches or they would snatch up her long dark hair and wind it around twigs until she was caught fast. But the muffled subtle sounds of the forest calmed her. Here no one told her how to milk her cow or coddle her eggs. No one offered advice on making friends or selling her handcrafts in the market or how to await the return of the men from the distant war. Her horse snuffled periodically, a quiet susurration of a rabbit's passing might rise from the sedges, and a trinkle of distant water was often the only sound.
Leora had ridden her roan mare, Sydva, in the forest every Sunday for months now. She crept deeper and deeper into the heart of the wood each time, even though no one was supposed to enter. The forest belonged to a long-gone chevalier. He was one of the men who had gone to fight the kingdom's many enemies, and no one knew when or if he would return. Even so, the laws were clear. To trespass on a chevalier's land was a high crime, punishable by long imprisonment or indentured servitude.
So Leora told no one of her journeys. When she found secret deer paths into the wood, she followed them quietly and carefully. She brought her Sunday meals into the forest with her, but made sure to leave no traces of her intrusion behind. And Sydva, though a large mare, was a dainty stepper—she never left hoofprints in the loam at the edges of the paths. Leora felt as if the forest was her sanctuary. At least until the men returned from war.
But let us consider Leora for a moment: She was tall, as tall as most of the men had been. Much taller than any other woman in the village, though not as tall as some of the Rama women that traveled from village to village telling futures and selling pins. She was dark, much darker than the blond, pale lovelies that lived in her village.
In this Leora resembled the Rama somewhat. And she was so large, her sisters would titter. In fact, this was the authoritative advice Leora heard most: "To become smaller, you must..." Rina said she should eat or drink nothing except cucumber water, and Laeva said she should wear tighter corsets, especially over those hips! Begostia said Leora must stop riding and sit very still, to lose some of the masculine musculature of her strong back and legs, and she should also eat only sorrel-parsnip gruel.
But Leora ignored them all. And so she remained much larger than the willowy wisps of women surrounding her, with her large round bosom, and large round hips and large round bottom. She had strong long legs, and hands capable of controlling any horse in the village. Her hair shot straight down her back to flare out when it reached her hips, and her grey eyes surveyed the busy work of the village like a pond so still that no ripples marred its surface. She wore the corsets required of her, though, even on horseback. She was awfully large, after all.
One Sunday in June, Leora rode quietly in the predawn darkness, down past the village well, the gate, the pasture. She entered the forest just as the sun rose, and headed straight for her favorite clearing for eating breakfast. At the edge of the forest birds were singing the dawn chorus, but as she entered the first row of beech trees, they immediately sounded muffled, as if they sung on the other side of a thick veil.
She sat on a log that curved to fit exactly to her posterior, let Sydva's reins dangle, and ate her oatcake breakfast. The pearly grey light of dawn slowly brightened into the green spangled light of the forest. Leora rested for a while, watching motes of dust and tiny insects flitting in a shaft of light.
She drank bergamot tea. After an hour or so, she stood and stretched, then mounted her mare. She steered the roan westward, toward the sound of water. This day, she thought, she would finally locate that stream.
Leora thought about living in the forest. Perhaps a tree house would work, she mused. Something snug in those larches over there, or high up a rope ladder in that hickory tree. She considered how she would sneak boards and nails into the forest, a few at a time, when she saw a new path peeking out beneath some dense berry bushes. She had never taken that path before, she thought, 'Perhaps the stream lays over that way.'
The bushes were so dense that she was forced to dismount, and took up Sydva's reins to guide her forward. As she past the first thick branches, and rounded a sharp bend in the path around some hemlock trees, she thought she saw a glint of light in the distance, through the branches.
'The stream!' she supposed. A small hillock led her downward, and the deer path narrowed even further. Soon the path became so narrow, and was bordered on the left by a rocky outcrop, that Sydva seemed uneasy and balked at going further. "Come on, horse!" cajoled Leora, "Think how nice it will be to taste the fresh water in the stream."
Every time she looked up, she thought she saw the glint of water, though confusingly in a slightly different location each time. She continued further and further, westward, downward, into the lowest ebb of the mountain's valley, for another half an hour. Soon she saw that the outcropping of stone on her left was joined by one on her right, until they met in front of her, with only a couple of feet between them, and a precariously perched boulder capping the stone passageway until it looked like a gothic archway.
Leora peered through the natural doorway and saw a dark black ribbon of water cutting through a small gorge ahead. "Here's the stream at last!" she told her horse. Her curved hips felt as if they would barely squeeze through the stone opening, and Sydva had to be coaxed through slowly, because she didn't like the sensation of the rock walls on either side of her.
But once they were through the passageway, the outcroppings fell away, and the stream rushed before them, eddying over smooth stones in a tinkling song. Sydva lowered her head to drink, and Leora joined her, cupping her hands.
The water was icy and tasted like tree sap and clean air. Leora sat on the bank of the gorge for several minutes, enjoying the cool moist breeze that passed along the waterway. She had worked up a bit of a sweat climbing down the narrow path, and this breeze felt wonderful.
She unbuttoned her dress a bit, to capture the cooling sensation between her breasts. She unbuttoned a bit more, and flapped the sides of her bodice to assist the breeze in blowing down into her corset. Then she lifted her skirts high above her knees, laid back on the warm stone, and rested. She would never dare to do such a thing in the village—all her neightbors would tease her for her breasts rising half-exposed into the air, and the round thighs open to the wind. But no one was around except for her horse, and Leora wanted to take a brief nap. Swiftly, she fell asleep.
When she awoke, there was a bit of a problem. The stream was gone. Her horse was gone. Her dress was gone. And she was bound in ropes and being carried in someone's arms through the dark maw of a castle gate, across a drawbridge, and up the steps of someone's hall.
