Forgetting that we were under new authority and doubtlessly a new set of rules, I slipped right through the ropes of the closest makeshift pen and greeted the palomino housed there. Sunny, a well-tempered young mare. She put her large head over my shoulder and nuzzled my hands, and I stroked her golden face, taking comfort in the exchange.
In the pens beside her were Duke, a gray appaloosa; Cameo, a small bay; Ghost, a spunky flea-bitten gray; and Lake, an exotic-looking blue roan. They tossed their ear-perked heads and flocked around me the best they could from their separate pens, stretching their necks over the ropes to nuzzle my hair.
“Well,” Sonya observed. “If we stick you out in front, we may get some eager, focused progress out of them, instead of their disoriented acting-up. You may be of more use to us as the carrot on the stick in front of our company, rather than picking up manure behind.”
I smiled slightly, humbly, but secretly hoped the first stones were paved.
“We're ready, Lieutenant!” one of the keepers called over.
“Good,” Sonya decreed. “Collapse these pens.” Including us in her next issuance, she said, “Tara's saddles are stacked and tied on the mules.”
They had taken the gear as well. I bit back my criticism. Perhaps seeing my struggle, Jay spoke up on my behalf before I could say anything condemning;
“She doesn't use a saddle, ma'am. And I'd just as soon not inconvenience your efficiency by untangling one for myself.”
“As you like. But we don't stop if you get tossed.”
She doesn't get tossed, I fancied him saying next, but he wouldn't go that far.
I chose Lake as my mount, particularly fond of her gait. She had a smooth trot and a nice, rocking canter, and was sturdy for a good run if necessary. Her conformation was a little funny, but she was a good mount, and her markings and coloring made up for any beauty-related shortcomings. Jay mounted Sunny – opting to at least employ the aid of a bridle, where I forewent gear entirely – and the Raiders herded us into formation with the rest of the equine stock and drove us out of the camp.
The raiders all carried knives, I noticed. At their waists, thighs, and often even saddles. Where were the machine guns that the stories of old told about? Had ten years of survival without further production rendered the devices extinct? If equestrian-driven wars were raging, I realized that might very well be the case.
Crowding in, the horses bumped against my legs. “We run a tight-knit operation,” Sonya explained from the edges of the herd, apparently watching me. “One gap, and these flighty guys are liable to split – not to mention all of the opportunist creatures out there. We've seen horse thieves, large cats, bears...even the occasional gorilla.”
“Gorilla?”
She nodded. “And the large cats in question aren't merely your everyday mountain kitties. We're talking lions, tigers. Hybrids. Ever visit the zoo as a child?” she asked.
It was my turn to nod.
“You can bet they're not operational anymore. All those animals – they're loose now. And they're hungry.”
I hadn't thought about it before, but of course it was true. “Any zebras?” I asked, and she smiled.
“We have a few of our own, actually,” she confirmed. “They may be small, but they're fierce little buggers. We have some ex-jockeys we're training to ride them. Perfect fit.”
I smiled, imagining.
“It's a bit of a circus, but we use what we can.”
“Got room for any more freaks?” I hazarded, seeing an opportunity.
“And what freakish ability do you claim to have on the market?”
“I can whisper to horses.”
She considered me, seeing that I was serious, then shook her head. “What was I just saying about opportunist creatures? And here we are with more of them in our midst than I thought. If you're a horse whisperer, why would Tara let you go so swiftly?”
“I left.”
“And your friend?”
“Jay. He left as well. He...does magic tricks. Makes things disappear.” I might have snickered as I said it, making over Fly's disappearance to Jay's advantage, if guilt had not accompanied the confession. For indeed, it was only a confession in a jester's clothing.
Since I couldn't be that serious about our circus-worthy qualities, Sonya divined that there was more beneath my words. “What does he make disappear?”
I should never have opened my mouth. “Oh, anything. But any self-respecting magician would get upset if their secrets were revealed, so...” I wouldn't look at her after that, afraid she would see right through me and read my thoughts. I couldn't say what they would do if they learned of Jay's treachery, but I didn't imagine sabotaging government procedures was ever a very favorable crime.
The breathtaking country sky was now an ashen tapestry that hung over the land like a smothering cowl. In my younger days it had been spectacular, always a canvas for the most ambitious of painters, alive and fresh and teeming with bird life. It was that vast, free explosion all around, that made every adventure breathless, limitless. But there was no more galloping into the sunset after the earth was pitched into a dipping and diving disarray, after the volcano activity that spewed ash into the heavens, after the impromptu bomb explosions had blown all kinds of matter sky-high. Galloping at all rather hurt the lungs, in many areas.
We trod over windows and shingles and toppled chimney bricks, paintings and bird cages and all manner of things that should never have been underfoot. One of those things was the graffiti. In our time of fallen walls, all the graffiti now lay underfoot – and the quakes had the uncanny tendency to turn the toppled statement blocks belly-up and showcase phrases like '&*$# The World' for all to see like some bad joke.
As we traveled I wondered what towns these places used to be, and how many bodies were trapped and buried there. But we moved through them and moved on, because the dead were dead and the ruins ruined, and reflecting on tragedy created a fog that was not appropriate for blazing our way across the Shardscape.
I became aware of the danger before the rest of the procession; I couldn't help it – I felt it through my legs, in Lake's telltale body language. Her muscles grew taut, and her prance picked up ever so slightly. I watched her ears, ideal radars for danger, and scanned the ruptured earth to the east looking for the source of her distress.
“Lieutenant...” I spoke, and then she began to feel it, too. She held up a hand, halting the procession, and everyone grew rigid surveying the wreckage.
One gravelly warning was all that we had before creatures reminiscent of Sonya's recent tales launched from nooks in the debris and rushed the procession, cat-like blurs ripping across the ground with a deadly silence – the kind that I imagined often made quick work of prey and left no evidence. But the company had encountered as much before, and they had weapons drawn and mounts staked tight in an instant. Man and beast collided, and steel went to work warding off tooth and nail.
“Calm the horses!” Sonya's voice rang out, for the ones that were loose in the middle were not trained for this, and their ranks were pushing outward, panicking, wanting to flee in the face of the attack. The men herding the group pressed tighter inward, but crowding the animals' space did nothing to soothe them. Bodies pressed in against my legs, and horses held their heads high vying for space, jostling against one another. Lake reared slightly, erupting beneath me as someone's haunches backed into her. I sent a series of soothing clicks toward her ears, but the distress of the others was too much.
Casting about for an alternative that didn't exist, I resigned myself to it and slipped from Lake's back, down into the teeming midst of the herd, and began to hum.
Five –
When it was over, they found me wandering among the herd, my eyes all but closed, running my hands over the horses' coats. A soft hum still murmured on my lips, barely a ghost of a spell.
“Alannis,” Sonya's voice cracked my trance, sounding as if it were not the first attempt. My eyes fluttered open,
and I blinked, disoriented, my hand resting on a chestnut's soft side. The animal was breathing quietly, its eyes cracking languidly at the lieutenant's bark. “That'll do,” Sonya dismissed my efforts.
I left off, issuing a final pat for good measure, as much to cover my awkward recovery as anything. Where had I gone, that I had lost myself so?
A cold breeze stirred through the ranks of the horses, gently lifting their manes and tousling their tails. I shivered, my coat seemingly incompatible with the draft.
Under the gazes of the witness-curious raiders, I remounted and tried to temper the self-consciousness that I suddenly felt as I settled back into my designated position. As we moved off, the horses stepped wide around the bodies of the slain cats, and I caught a glimpse of them. Like cheetahs and lions bred together, lanky and spotted with cheetah faces, but duller in color and sporting mane-like ruffs and tufts on the tips of their tails. Hybrids.
We set out across the countryside once more, and the rhythm and feel of a horse beneath me, warm and steady and strong, lulled away my discomfort and eased me swiftly back into myself. The only remaining sign of the episode displayed itself in the way Jay would not look at me, and the suppressed dismay that I felt at him taking this part of me the way that he was.
*
At the end of the day, Sonya did not kick us out for cheetah fodder like our deal entailed. Instead, she called me into her tent.
“Wouldn't you make faster progress without the tents?” I inquired.
“We get into some pretty toxic air,” she responded. “The tents help filter some of it out. Ashe, at least.”
I stood uncomfortably, not sure what the little conference would hold. But her tent smelled horsey, her saddle and an extra pair of boots stowed in the corner, and that was homey to me.
Not sure what to do with my hands for the exchange – with horses it was more obvious; you just petted them – I tried to shove them in my pockets, but they didn't fit well. Retracting them, I opted to almost clasping them in front of me, playing with my ring finger as a married person might.
“How do you do it?” Sonya wanted to know.
“Do what?”
“Do what indeed, Miss Wilde. The thing you do with the horses.”
“I did tell you I whisper to horses.”
“But how does it work? Is it science? Art?”
“It's hereditary.”
“So you just...crawled around under the horses' feet as a toddler and they bent to your whim?”
“It manifested later on. But it's from my father. And neither science nor art will describe it by themselves.”
“Can it be taught?”
No, felt like the obvious answer, the one I wanted to give, but in truth, “I've...never tried to teach it.”
“Do you think that you could? Try, that is.”
“To who?”
“I have a number of trainers in my employment. Experts, all of them. Their work produces some good solid horses. But we don't need solid. We need magic.”
“Magic doesn't exist,” I said, but really it was only an attempt to lower expectation, to stay in control of the situation. For I knew what it felt like to harness a thousand pounds of wild muscle, to feel sweat-foamed mane in my face like the spray of the ocean, to outrun the wind and shake the earth to its bones as surely as any quake with the very hooves beneath me. I knew what it was like to feel coarse wild-mustang coats turn to silk beneath my stroking hands, to dance among hooves that could kill wolves, to breathe my carnivore breath into nostrils that channeled wind and freedom and see the eyes of these beasts of prey soften to me, open to me. 'Magic' was the only word for it.
“Even still,” Sonya said. “It takes more than good training to prepare ordinary mounts to go up against Gabriel's Demon Horses. No practical training can properly reinforce a horse's mind with the manner of courage that is required to resist turning tail and running in the face of fire-breathing, fanged and clawed, carnivorous kin-like demons. If we could incorporate a method that went, shall we say, more soul-deep, our armies might find it in them to aspire to doing more than getting their feet wet in the blood left over from yesterday's slaughter.”
“My bond with horses does not thrive on the terms of duping them into running full-tilt toward their deaths,” I said wryly.
“Duping? Is what you do really so much of a sham?”
“Charming. Whatever.”
“And here I thought you were aspiring to charm your way into my operation,” Sonya said, a little surprised at my resistance.
I needed to get my story straight. But I couldn't help being conflicted. For survival's sake, I was aspiring to what she suspected, but I was still raw over the incident with Fly. It was inevitable that I resented this operation as much as I saw a place for myself in it.
I ducked my head, not knowing how to smooth the dual-impression I was giving off. A lock of hair slipped from behind my ear and fell in my face, a single branch of willow veil bobbing in the draft of my thoughtful breath.
“It's a hard world right now, Alannis. War is reality. If you don't claim to believe in magic, then good – blood, sweat and tears are the practicality this age calls for. And if you really do subscribe to magic, you will have to stop living in a fantasy sooner or later. Gabriel's armies will trample whatever and whomever they encounter in their trailblazing. They are paving the way for a new empire, not pausing to appreciate the scenery or spare the innocent. And there is nothing beautiful enough in this world to be worth saving. It is to be all new. All his.”
I looked up, my face grave in appreciation for what she was saying. “How bad is it?”
“He has seized the Northwest outright and conquered a good portion of the Midwest.” Unbuttoning the cuff of her sleeve, she rolled it up to reveal a vaccination tattoo of the initials C.O.; the territory that was once called Colorado. Many of the military personnel preferred the initials of the things they were honoring on their skin. Everything was code and abbreviation for them. “According to this, I belong to him,” she said; an indication he had taken the sector of land that used to be her state. “Many of us are branded by land that is now his. Of course, he'll call it something else.”
“Like what?”
“Stupid things. The entire thing, he seems to be calling Reincarnation – a painful play on words pertaining to the way he envisages the nation and his plans for it. Particular states are being deemed things that follow along the same lines. Washington, his home and first seizure, is now called 'Rebirth'. Oregon has become Revival. Nevada: Evolution. Idaho: Resurrection. Montana is 'Redeemed'. California, of course, broke off from the United States entirely in the first quake. What is left of it is being called Reach, or Reach Island. Arizona has become Ripen, and Wyoming he is calling something along the brainless lines of Transmogrification.”
“I guess he ran out of R's,” I said gravely, a sad attempt at humor in the face of such devastating news.
“Unfortunately, that seems to be doing nothing to stop him. He'll be happy to move right along with Transmutation, Distortion, and...Vicissitude.”
“There was Evolution in there anyway,” I pointed out soberly, thinking. What was my role to be in this? Was my lovely Virginia to become Maturation? Augmentation? Some new made-up synonym for what was becoming of our nation that completed Gabriel's continental Frankenstein?
I looked up, meeting her waiting eyes. “What about Jay?” I asked.
“If you can teach horse whispering to the rest of my staff, there's no reason he can't fill another pair of boots for mass-production of these creatures.”
“And if I can't? If it's just me?”
“You said he could make things disappear. Anything,” Sonya reminded me. “Maybe he could try his hand with Gabriel.”
Though she had to be joking, her face was serious. She was offering us a chance – both of us – but as I prepared to accept, I also prepared myself for convincing Jay it was in his best interests to take up a serious hobby as a magician,
and the excuses I would have to conjure up to explain why it had suddenly become necessary for him to do so.
Six –
By the time we reached the official camp that hosted the East's defensive efforts, we were traveling with a great many horses. Two more raids had waited in the path of the return trip – it made more sense, the Lieutenant said, to travel light as far out as they planned to raid, and only then start recruitment as they worked backwards, so they did not have to worry about driving and feeding and containing extra horses both ways.
Tara's camp had been just inside the ruptured border of what used to be Kentucky, respectively. It was hardcore horse country – or had been – and I was not surprised that two more raids were carried out in this part of the Shardscape. Both of the operations were salvaged-white-picket-fence compounds, with lots of Thoroughbred blood in their ranks. Thoroughbreds – America's racehorses. Tall and hot-headed and bred with the desire to be turned loose. I had my hands full, quickly deemed their keeper. “Do your thing,” Sonya had said, and suddenly I had a whole herd of racehorses under my newly-promoted wing.
Camp Safeguard lay in what was left of Missouri. With boundaries so toppled and skewed, it was all the same to me, but it still hit home, imagining. Imagining that this place used to be defined, as my Virginia was defined. That it used to be its own body, before demon seizures had taken over, before disease had scarred it beyond recognition.
Safeguard was encircled by an impressive reconstruction of walls, various towering slabs salvaged from the Shardscape that were pitched upright and reinforced by a lining of tree pillars. Fallen trees that had been hoisted vertically again for the purpose, restored to a partial state of glory. It was dormant glory, but it was at least better than leaving them to rot on the ground, enduring entities of great heights defeated underfoot.
We rode through the gates, our entrance wave-like and lengthy. The camp reverberated with our arrival, drawing onlookers. They appeared used to the procedure, standing with hands resting casually on their hips, merely curious as to the result of the harvest.
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