The Horse In The Mirror

by Lisa Maxwell

  Chapter 3

  Brandy watched Is working the liver chestnut stallion. He was a beautiful animal with sloping shoulders, great muscular hindquarters and a lovely arched neck. Except that his head was a little large and a little Roman-nosed, his conformation was nearly perfect, showing the best mix of the bulk of the draft horse and the refinement and speed of the native breed. Brandy could see the horse's training had come a long way since his last visit. There was a special communion between Is and this horse. That wasn't good. Brandy knew the danger signs.

  You could lose a good trainer a lot of ways. Sometimes they got hurt one time too many by the horses and lost their nerve. Sometimes they got too scared of the berserkers' visits. Sometimes they became too attached to a horse. And worst of all, sometimes they started questioning the system.

  Is had at least two of the danger signs. She was too attached to this horse. And, Brandy suspected that a lot of the anger she had held against the marauders who killed her parents had swung around to be focused against the system that took her horses from her and made her vulnerable to the berserkers.

  Sometimes it helped to remind the trainers how important they were to the success of the entire Alliance. To the rest of the population the trainers were heroes. Not only could they handle the much-feared war horses, but also they were the only thing standing between the people and the marauders who would destroy the farms on which everyone depended for food.

  The horse trainers were usually picked from the children of the upper classes. It was easy for Brandy to appeal to the patriotism that was so inculcated into them. But Is was an anomaly in the system. As the orphaned daughter of farm parents she had not been of a high enough station to receive the benefits of the culture she now worked to protect.

  Brandy knew it was time to bring Is in. He also knew that short of drugging and tying her he'd never make it. Once Is saw the way of things, she'd go rogue and it would be ten days to a place where Brandy could count on getting help with her. He couldn't handle her alone for that long.

  He thought about knocking her out and taking the horses. She'd be on foot then and she'd either stay here and the Alliance would pick her up for reconditioning, or she'd trek off and hide and probably perish. The important thing was that Brandy mustn't let her take the horses and run.

  In the end Brandy decided on the course he usually took, the course of least resistance. He got Is to drink with him.

  She usually wouldn't drink more than a few sips, but Brandy was quite skillful. He pretended to be getting drunk and started telling Is the kind of stories she'd want to hear, rumors about how the whole berserker system might be shutting down. He wasn't supposed to tell her this, oh no. But who could she tell? And with drunken sincerity he made her swear to secrecy anyway. Then he told her how the Alliance had found a better way to control the Blueskins.

  As with the berserker system it would avoid an all-out war that would decimate the Blueskins, for the Blueskins did serve a purpose. Their savagery kept all the other things that lived behind the Boundary in check.

  The new method would appeal to the Blueskins’ primitive awe of a superior warrior just as the berserkers did. But unlike the berserkers, the new plan would not risk the lives of horses.

  Brandy could not tell Is more about it. He wasn't even supposed to tell this much and he changed the subject to how war horses were going to be kept in state. They had been such an important part of the Alliance for so long they would still be bred and trained, but for show and display only. They'd be honored for all time for the role they had played in making the Alliance a safe place to live. Of course the trainers would go with their horses. Who else could show them? Surely not the berserkers. There'd be no more berserkers made. The trainers would be glorified for the part they'd played in defending the Alliance. Brandy knew that didn’t matter to Is. What mattered to her was that she’d be allowed to stay with her stallions.

  He managed to get two drinks into her that night. With her armor somewhat relaxed, Brandy set the hypnotic induction field and Is went under easily enough. It was a different Brandy who spoke to her then. His voice was cultured. His cadence was exactly fitted to the Field for maximum strength. Even so he didn't try to do too much He just told her to stay here, better days were coming soon, and he reminded her of the dangers that lurked in the Boundary, elaborating on the childhood horror stories all children were told.

  The next day, when Brandy was leaving, Is asked him how long it would be before he sent the lumber crew to repair the barn. That was the only clue she gave him.

  He paused to think about his answer, then told her he had to visit the station to the east of hers before he headed back to the Alliance. It would probably be two weeks before he got to where he could fast the order, then maybe another two or three weeks before the wagon arrived at her place.

  He headed out in the proper direction, put two ridges between them and turned abruptly south toward the Alliance.

  Is waited until the next day, then she took the liver chestnut for a ride and found where Brandy's tracks turned south. She rode home slowly. In her heart she had known Brandy was lying to her. Things were not going to change, not soon. Brandy was heading back to where he could fast his order immediately. He had deliberately built more time into his plan to mislead her. It would not be a lumber wagon that came and it would not take the four plus weeks Brandy wanted her to believe. Is didn't know exactly what was happening. She only knew she had lost her last horse to a berserker.

  With that decision came a sudden upwelling of her spirit. Delighted by the unexpected feeling of freedom, Is put the stallion into a gallop. He went effortlessly, his long strides springing them over the rough ground as if it were cushioned meadowland. For a time Is let the stallion's rhythm carry her, her body working in unison with his. She loved the power and speed that were suddenly hers, the horse's body an extension of her own. She thought nothing and immersed herself in the pure animal pleasure of galloping.

  By the time she had walked the stallion cool her mind was working again, frantically. It was one thing to decide to steal a war horse and run; it was another to do it. For one thing, Is was terrified. The only direction open to her was into the Boundary. There was no doubt in her mind that the Alliance would hunt her down and punish or kill her if she stayed in their territory. Stealing a war horse would be considered an act of treason. Her only hope of escaping the Alliance lay in going into the Boundary.

  She didn't know if the Alliance would send troopers, or maybe even a berserker after her. But it was the other things that lived in the Boundary that she found herself fearing most.

  The Blueskins were first on her mind. She knew what they did to women and she feared them deeply. But at least they were human Except for the bluish cast to their skin they looked like other men, just larger and stronger than most But the other things that were said to live in the Boundary ... Is had no idea how she could face them.

  The great lizards could run down a horse over a short distance. She knew of their voracious appetites. Then there was something that stood on its back legs like a man, with long hooked claws on its hands and the strength of a berserker. Even more frightening than that, there were forces that could manifest as winds, or rock slides, voices where there shouldn't be voices, fogs that could drive you off your route and drive you crazy, rivers that were poison, eagles large enough to consider her prey, and other things, more evil and less understandable. She found her mind full of them.

  She tried to tell herself that death at their hands wasn't any worse than awaiting her fate with the Alliance. She believed herself. That didn't make her any less fearful.

  She thought about how it would be if she got the stallion killed and that almost stopped her, but his fate with the Alliance would be no better.

  Horses didn't want to be weapons. Left on their own horses ran away from danger. Running away would be her strategy too. This stallion wasn't as heavily built as some of the war
horses she'd trained and he was faster than most. She'd do everything she could to protect him. Surely that was better than letting him be ridden into attack by a man who cared about nothing but attack.

  Somewhere along the line Is found that she had decided not to take the other two horses. The liver chestnut was "hers" in some way the other two weren't, so it wasn't so much like stealing.

  She waited six more days before leaving, needing a head start on whatever troopers Brandy had sent for her, but not wanting the other horses left alone too long. They would be safe in their paddocks for the two or three days the troopers should be behind her, she reasoned. She'd leave them more than enough hay for a week, in case she'd miscalculated. They would soil and waste a lot of it, their pens would be a mess and they would be high-spirited, but the troopers could handle them. If she were wrong about the troopers coming, the horses would starve to death. But her guts told her she was not wrong.

  She spent the intervening days getting ready. She sewed her quilts together to make a sleeping bag. She fashioned a tent and tarp from the waterproof grain sacks.

  She packed rice, beans and flour but she knew she would have to learn to live off the land even more than she did now. She took her hunting knives, skinning knives, rope for snares and other purposes, and extra leather for repairing tack.

  The things that would be most irreplaceable were metal: a bucket, the knives, a rasp for the horse's hooves, a hammer, a bowl, spoon and cup, the axe. It helped that she had already lived a simple existence close to the land all these years.

  When she finally turned the stallion's head north he looked more like a pack animal than a war horse. The two younger stallions were in the paddock where she often left them when she rode the liver chestnut. When they crested the first ridge she stopped and looked back. For some reason both the young stallions raised their heads and whinnied. There was no way they could know she was not coming back. It was just coincidence she told herself.

  She was sadder to leave them behind than she had thought she would be. She took one last look at the valley where she had lived. The grass was still showing green in irregular splotches, but the bushes and trees were mostly leafless. Their bare branches had a reddish cast. A few bright yellow leaves still clung here and there in clumps, adding dashes of color. The taller grasses where the horses hadn't eaten were shades of bay and chestnut It was not a good time of year to be setting out across mountains.

  The house, barn and paddocks nestled in the middle of the valley, a little village unto themselves. Is had stood down there and looked up at this ridge how many times? She had watched these mountains in all their moods, survived their winters, celebrated the springs, cursed the mud, hated the ice as she'd broken it from the water buckets in the stalls, and basked in the heat of late summer afternoons with her horses grazing all around her. Over the years she'd watched colts grow and change from gangly, uncoordinated yearlings to beautiful, intelligent beings as she sculpted their bodies and brought out their capacity to learn with her training. That was her life.

  It called her now to return. But she knew it was already changed. Troopers were riding toward her as she should be riding away from them.

  Is turned the stallion down the back side of the ridge. They kept to a northerly direction, letting the lay of the mountains determine their course. She had never gone more than half a day's ride in this direction and was soon in new territory. But she knew the berserkers always went this way so there must be a pass through which they could ride a horse. Her plan was to get through that pass as quickly as she could, then bear east or west and try to find a sheltered place to spend the winter. Maybe if she didn't go too deep into the Boundary nothing would bother her.

  From the top of the next ridge she studied the land ahead. The mountains rose like a barrier, sheer and uninviting. There was only one notch in their formidable facade. It had to be the pass.

  That evening they camped near a little creek and Is let the horse loose to graze. She thought they were too far from home for him to head back there so he would probably stay with her for companionship. If he wouldn't, it was as well to find out now.

  Is ate a cold dinner. She would have no cook fires until she was sure there was no pursuit. She did not know when that would be.

  In spite of being tired she was lonely and nervous. She could not bring herself to go inside a tent where she could be trapped. She pitched only the fly, unrolled her sleeping bag and lay awake a long time imagining all the things, natural and supernatural, that could kill a horse. He was truly her only friend now.

  Horses had been her only friends for a long time. When she finally slept, her dreams were full of the horrors from a time before that was true.

  . . . Her father had taken an axe when he went out to meet the Blueskins. He hadn't limped. It was the only time Is had not seen him limp on his gimped-up leg. When the Blueskins saw that he would fight they dismounted. They towered over her father. Their bare chests painted in slashes of blood red and rock-sickle orange made their skin look even more blue.

  Her father's axe glinted in the morning sun, raised above his shoulder. Is saw it begin its forward, downward stroke . . .

  The scream ripped across her dream. Her mother's scream. The harsh grunts of the men ... the blood across her mother's bare thigh . . .

  Absolute stillness.

  . . . The sun not moving in the sky. The heat pressing her to the ground. The weight of the shovel in her hands. The over-loud scrape of its bite into the gravelly soil. An eternity passing, one shovel full after the next, after the next.

  . . . The grave grew until it was deeper than Is was tall. A moon lit the sky above her but in the grave it was dark and very still. She slept there when her body stopped moving. The earth was cold. She should be cold. She felt nothing.

  . . . Morning was almost as dark as the night had been. Fog seeped over the edge of the grave and flowed down into the hole with her. It looked like a waterfall frozen in slow motion. When she threw a shovel full of dirt out it fell back in. She had to climb out to move the dirt away from the edge so it wouldn't keep falling in. A sound drew her attention. A horse came trotting out of the mist. It was gray like the mist, with a black leather harness and blinkers on its bridle, pulling a flatbed wagon. Another horse, dark as a shadow, and its rider followed behind.

  When she saw the two men she felt relief. It didn't occur to her that they would take her away. She didn't realize she couldn't stay at her home anymore because she was only twelve years old and they couldn't leave her there alone. She was just relieved they had come because they would know how to get her mother into the grave. She had been dreading that. The thought of having to touch her mother's stiff and violated body was terrible enough. But the thought of having to drag her across the ground, which was the only way Is could move her, and then watch her fall into the hole, made Is feel panicky.

  And then there was her father. The Blueskins had cut his head off with his own axe and Is was afraid to pick it up with her hands. She was afraid of it, afraid of him . . . but these men wouldn't be afraid to pick up a man's head and put it in a grave.

  She was relieved when they told her to get into the wagon. She thought they would finish burying her parents and she wouldn’t have to watch their bodies falling into the hole or the dirt being thrown in on top of them. Instead, the wagon started to move away. Is knew that wasn't right. The man driving told her to stay right where she was. She did not want to disobey him but then she looked back and saw the smoke. They had not buried her parents. They had burned them and the house and everything.

  . . . She heard the man running behind her and ran as hard as she could but he grabbed her. She fought as her mother had fought, but he was too strong. He carried her back to the wagon and tied her in it.

  The other man was angry when he caught up to them riding his horse. The two men argued. The second man asked her to promise not to run away again so he could untie her. She wouldn't promise anything to
a man who'd burned her home.

  Is stirred, crossing from dream into wakefulness without leaving the dream behind. It had happened half her lifetime ago, but the dreams kept it as clear as yesterday.

  She shifted her position, trying to shift her thoughts, and another memory took her into sleep.

  . . . The man's footsteps echoed in the stone hallway as he walked in front of her. She had to hurry to keep up with him in this strange cold place.

  He stopped at one in the endless row of doors they had passed. "Go in." These were the first words he had spoken to her except "Follow me."

  There were probably ten kids in the room. They were sitting on a bench, and they all stared at Is as she walked in.

  The door closed behind her and she stood, uncertain what to do.

  Finally one of the boys got up and sauntered over to her. He was a lot taller than she. He had a haughty belligerent air about him as he walked around her. Suddenly he reached out and jerked her shirt, ripping it.

  "What kind of clothing is that?" he asked scornfully.

  "It's rags," a girl answered. She unfolded gracefully from the bench. She was tall and beautiful and at least three or four years older than Is. But her tone and posture were insulting.

  "It's what peasants wear. Ain't you never seen a peasant?" she said to the boy.

  It was a shirt Is's mother had made for her. It was the same woven fiber that everyone wore where Is came from. But these kids were dressed in some materials Is had never seen before. They were neat and clean and their hair was done in fancy ways, not the braids Is wore. She knew she didn't belong here and she wanted to leave as much as the other children seemed to want her to leave, but the man had said, "Your parents are dead, do you understand that? They are dead. Gone. Your home is gone."

  They had been in a room with a high ceiling and wood panels covering the perfectly good stone walls, because they were so rich here they could have both.

  "You have nowhere to go except where we tell you to go. You don't own anything. You don't have any rights. You're a ward of the Alliance. That means we're going to feed and house you and you're going to learn to do something useful to earn your keep. You understand that? Earn your keep?"

  He was a very stern man with down turned lines at the corners of his mouth. He seemed to be angry at her for being there although Is didn't want to be there any more than he wanted her there.

  "You can make this easy on yourself, or hard," he said. "Your folks would have wanted you to do what you're told, learn to earn your keep."

  On her family’s farm everyone had earned their keep. But on the farm there had been love and happiness and sharing. Is could already see that it wasn’t going to be like that in the government school.

  She woke to what she thought was the absolute dark of the windowless dorm room where she had lived those first years in the Alliance. Then she smelled the trees sleeping all around her and felt the cold damp air. She was free of the awful school, free of the Alliance. A strange, defiant joy filled her. This might not last long, it might not end well, but for the moment she was free!

  She had spent six horrible months in that school before she had been picked to go to the equestrian academy. The contact with the horses had come as a great relief. Although her poor farm parents had not been allowed to own a horse, Is had been around plenty of other animals. She knew their basic natures and she knew they would always be true to those natures. If you understood that, an animal would never betray you. It couldn't betray its nature.

  To Is, horses were the most beautiful of all animals. The way the government restricted their use and breeding made them even more thrilling because they were unobtainable. On horseback, one would be taller, faster, more beautiful, and surely smarter, more pure, and more courageous than ordinary mortals. But beneath all the romanticism in her heart Is knew horses were animals. So she had applied herself to learning their true natures while she worked at cleaning their stalls, grooming them, feeding them, and learning to care for their medical problems. But through it all she had never missed a chance to watch the riders being trained.

  Lowly apprentices, like Is, had to work for years before they were allowed to train as riders. She slid back into an uneasy sleep, her mind reliving the horrors of those years when her only relief had been the quiet moments spent grooming the horses.

  Is broke out of her memories to the song of a bird, a meadowlark. It was morning although still very early. A mist had formed a few feet above the ground, like a blanket. But when she stood up, her head rose above the fog. The morning was outrageously beautiful. The sky was deep blue, not a cloud anywhere. The peaks rose all around, snowcapped against the sky. A creek gurgled, unseen, As Is walked, the mist swirled about her legs. Then she saw the stallion and her heart leapt. He had stayed with her. Is had not allowed herself to realize how important that was to her. Suddenly the whole thing seemed possible. They might get somewhere and find a place to live, and it wouldn't be much different from life at the station except the horse would never be taken from her. She could be happy.

  She waded through the mist to the horse. He was resting one hind leg, sleeping in the way horses do, aware of her approach but not truly awake. She spoke to him and touched his neck. His hair felt damp and she could see how moisture had collected in little beads on the tips of the long hair he was growing for winter. When she stroked it, her hand left a wet swath. He turned his face to her. His eyes were so gentle and trusting that Is was suddenly overcome with the feeling that she had done the right thing. He towered over her but he was all gentleness. She stroked his ears the way he liked and let herself feel her love for him. The meadowlark called again, clear and achingly beautiful. The stallion turned his head, his ears pointed to listen.

  "Lark" she said softly, explaining to him that it was just a bird, nothing to fear. Then a funny feeling passed through her. "Lark," she said again and it was his name. She had never named a horse before. It was against the law. But now the law had no hold over her.

  With the name she confirmed herself. Outlaw. It was as simple as that.