the Year the Horses came

by Mary Mackey

  Suddenly she stopped in the middle of the path and began to laugh. A flock of startled seagulls took flight at the sound, whirring with harsh cries. Sometimes you had to go to the bottom of self-pity to get through it. A wasted life indeed! She was only seventeen, and with or without Stavan, she was going to have an interesting life, lots of children, lovers if she wanted them, even a partner some day. Feeling considerably more cheerful, she hurried toward the temple, ashamed to have made her grandmother wait so long.

  Soon she saw it, perched on the top of the cliff directly above the entrance to the Dreaming Cave. It was an unusual temple, perhaps the most unusual one east of the land of the Hita. Large enough to hold over a dozen worshipers, the temple had been formed in the shape of a breast surrounded by the coils of the Snake Goddess, whose head rose above the roof for fifteen handspans. Like all the snake sculptures of Shara, this Batal had a human nose, but Her eyes were the round, hypnotic eyes of a snake. As Marrah looked up, Batal's long neck seemed to sway in the wind. It was only an illusion caused by the clouds scudding behind Her head, but impressive nevertheless.

  All this would have been enough to make the temple one of the wonders of the Sweetwater Sea, but there was more. The official name of the building was the Temple of Children's Dreams. At Marrah's suggestion, the children of Shara had been invited to etch pictures of their dreams in the wet clay of Batal's coils before they were fired. The smallest ones had only left handprints, but some of the older children had drawn fantastic scenes: flying bird-women, talking fish, flowers with faces, and so forth. When the pilgrims bathing in the sacred hot spring looked up at the temple, they saw coils of dreams rising into the air like frozen smoke.

  There were half a dozen pilgrims in the water now, several clearly ill but others simply bathing for blessings and good luck. As Marrah passed they called out formal greetings, putting the pink, steaming tips of their fingers together in the universal sign of respect. It occurred to Marrah that even when she was in a hurry, dressed in an ordinary cloak with wind snarls in her hair and boots that could use mending, the pilgrims could tell she was a priestess. As she climbed the last few steps to the temple, she wondered what it was that gave her away.

  "You certainly took your time," Lalah said as Marrah pushed aside the leather door curtain. She looked at her sharply as if she was thinking about giving her a lecture on the virtues of punctuality, but there were guests present and Queen Lalah never liked to criticize her own in front of strangers. Turning to the two women who sat to her left, she smiled with studied courtesy. You would have had to have known her well indeed to guess she was annoyed.

  "Now that my granddaughter, Marrah, has arrived, I think we can begin." The women smiled back, put completely at ease, which was exactly what she had intended. As the twenty-seventh priestess queen in a direct line that had passed from mother to daughter or sister to sister from time out of mind, Lalah of Shara knew she always ran the risk of intimidating people, but fortunately she looked motherly and harmless, which was not to say she lacked a keen mind or the ability to strike as quickly as Batal Herself when order had to be imposed. In her youth, she'd had a reputation for sarcasm, a quick wit, and a sharp tongue, but self-control had come with age and now strangers often mistook her for a sweet old woman.

  Marrah knew better. Lalah's face was like a mirror that showed her what she herself might be like in forty years or so. Although her grandmother was taller than she was, she had given Marrah her long nose, full lips, curly hair, and prominent cheekbones. Behind her sweet face lay a quick temper, passionate curiosity, and a longing for adventure that she often satisfied by interrogating travelers until they were too weary to go on talking. Marrah hoped that this afternoon her grandmother would be brief. If she didn't get back to the city in plenty of time for the feasting and dancing in her honor, everyone was going to be disappointed.

  To her relief, Queen Lalah got straight to the point. "Tell Marrah what you just told me," she suggested, motioning to the strangers to draw closer to the clay brazier and warm themselves. The women approached the glowing charcoal and held out their hands. Both were dressed in stout leather boots and long hooded robes woven from strands of mud-colored fur mixed with flax. Marrah had the feeling that she'd seen that kind of fur before, but for the moment she couldn't remember where. In any case, it was obvious they'd come from far away. No one in Shara dressed in hooded robes; they looked enviously warm.

  The elder cleared her throat and bowed in an odd, bobbing way, first to Lalah and then to Marrah and then to her companion, as if not knowing whether to salute her too or leave her out altogether. She was a countrywoman, not used to the politer forms of city life.

  "Mother Marrah," she said, although it would have been clear to anyone that Marrah was younger than she was by several years, "my name is Nisig. My sister and I come from the village of Nemsha, which rests on the edge of the world. We're farmers, my sisters and mother and me; we grow barley mostly, which does well because it's colder in our land."

  Marrah stared at her in astonishment. The woman was speaking perfect Shambah. "Do you come from the edge of the Sea of Grass?" she asked eagerly, hoping for news of Stavan.

  Nisig stopped in mid-sentence, clearly puzzled by the question. "I've never heard of such a sea, dear Mother, but there's much grass where we live. The forest ends not far from our village, and where it begins again no one knows." She looked at her sister, who nodded. Encouraged, she continued.

  "Two years ago, in the month of first frosts, a man walked out of the forest and asked for a warm bed by our fire. He was strange-looking — very tall — but in those days we had no fear of strangers, so we fed him, and when he left, our village elders offered him dried food and a warm cloak because he said he was going north and winter was coming on. To thank us, he gave us a warning. A great priestess called Marrah of Xori had had a vision that the world was about to end. Men sitting on the backs of some kind of big animal" — she paused and smiled shyly as if embarrassed by the foolishness of such an idea — "were going to come out of the east and kill us, so we'd better leave our village right away before they arrived."

  She shook her head. "Well, we all thought he was crazy and we told him so. 'Thank you,' we said, 'but we've lived here all our lives and we love this land, so we're not going anywhere.' When he saw we were staying put, he got mad and called us a flock of sheep, but since he was a crazy man and sacred to the Goddess because of his madness, we gave him soft answers. I think he must have liked us for that, because instead of stamping off with a curse, he gave us another warning before he left. 'If anything bad happens,' he said, 'go to the city of Shambah and let them know; and after you've told the elders there, go on to the city of Shara and ask for Marrah of Xori, and when you find her say Stavan the Hansi sends his love to her and' — dear Mother, are you ill?"

  It was a reasonable question. Marrah had cried out at the sound of Stavan's name, and now she was sitting on one of the clay benches, white-faced and trembling.

  "No," she said. "Go on. What more did he say? Please, tell me quickly."

  "Nothing, Mother. That was the whole message. I'm sorry. Should there have been more?"

  "You forgot the seeds," her sister said. "Give the mother priestess the seeds, you silly goat."

  Nisig turned almost purple with embarrassment. Fumbling in the leather pocket that hung from her belt, she pulled out a linen packet of seeds and offered it to Marrah. "The stranger said we should give these to you, Mother; he said you'd know what to do with them; he said they were berry seeds, but I'm sorry to say he was wrong. Any farmer could tell you there are two different kinds of seeds here and neither of them will produce berries. Why, just look how big they are. Berry seeds are tiny little things that..." Her voice trailed off, and she looked at Marrah with unconcealed curiosity as Marrah eagerly poured the seeds into the palm of her hand.

  "Marrah," Lalah said sharply, "there'll be time enough for that later. I know this is the news you've been waiting for,
but dry your tears of joy and listen. These women have more to tell us, and it's nothing to rejoice over."

  Sobered by her grandmother's reprimand, Marrah poured the seeds back into the packet.

  "Tell my granddaughter why you came south to Shara."

  Nisig swallowed hard and looked at her sister. "The summer before last, people started showing up in our village. They weren't traders because there were old people and little children among them, and they were carrying things they had no intention of selling. Some of them were driving a few cows or goats, and others had temple goddesses on their backs. They didn't speak our language, but we could tell they were scared of something. They kept pointing to the east and crying, but we couldn't understand what had happened, so we fed them and gave them a warm place to sleep and watched them move on. After a while, they stopped coming and everything went back to normal, and then — "

  She swallowed hard again and pressed her lips together as if she was trying not to cry. "A few months ago a whole village to the east of ours just disappeared — all of it: every woman, man, and child. I had two brothers and five cousins in that village. They used to come to our celebrations, and sometimes we'd help one another at harvest-time. "

  She looked from Lalah to Marrah. "We saw the smoke in Nemsha, but by the time we got there, there was nothing left but burned clan houses. The barley'd been trampled and the cows were gone. We found the village dogs with their throats slit, and we found this." She walked over to Marrah, bowed, and placed something in her hand. It was a small piece of copper, thin as a fingernail, blackened by smoke.

  "Do you have any idea what it is?" Lalah said.

  Marrah nodded, too sickened to speak.

  "Well, don't just sit there. Tell us."

  "It's the beast that's coming from the east," Marrah said through clenched teeth. "It's called a horse." She handed the ornament back to her grandmother. "It's an evil charm; it doesn't belong in a temple dedicated to the dreams of children."

  Lalah turned the ornament over in her hand, inspecting it from all angles. Then, without another word, she rose to her feet, walked over to the brazier, and dropped the horse on the hot coals. The copper melted almost instantly, sending up a trail of greenish smoke. Lalah wrinkled her nose. "It leaves behind a bad smell." She pointed to the leather window curtains. "Open those up, and let's have some fresh air in here."

  The rest of the winter was long and unseasonably cold. The two farmers who had brought the news of the burned village stayed only long enough to bathe in the sacred spring before they boarded a boat going north, but like the bitter winds, their presence lingered. For days on end, the Council of Elders met, trying to decide what to do, but as Stavan had predicted, they had no practical solutions to offer. In the streets of Shara people clustered in small, worried groups, and the holy days of midwinter, which were usually so festive, were celebrated in a distracted way that left everyone feeling vaguely out of sorts. Something seemed out of tune at the heart of the city, something not even Arang's quick feet and bright smile could dance back into harmony.

  Everyone knew about the prophecy, and now the rumors began: a great fire was burning in the east, consuming everything; Shambah had been destroyed; all the cities along the River of Smoke had vanished. Sharans were great storytellers, and as they sat in their snug houses, drinking warm wine, they created elaborate fantasies like children frightening each other after the grown-ups have gone to sleep. At least that was the way Marrah felt when she heard them. Had the end of the world really begun? If so, you wouldn't have guessed it from the way those same storytellers went about their daily business. Occasionally she would hear someone make a sensible suggestion like posting guards around the city, but when it came to drawing lots to see who would stand out in the cold all night there were never any takers. When she herself suggested more drastic measures — like building walls around Shara or moving the whole city to the top of the cliffs — people made polite noises, but she could see that even her own grandmother thought she was slightly crazed.

  Move Shara? Lalah cried. Move a city that had sat at the center of the civilized world for countless generations? You might just as well try to pick up the Sweetwater Sea and put it in the west or pluck the moon out of the sky and use it for a lamp. No matter what visions the priestesses were given, no matter what warnings Sabalah sent from the West or what news came from the north, Lalah wasn't about to wall up the spiral of life energy or move the great snake of the city from holy ground. Whatever was coming, they'd survive.

  "When you live in Shara," she told Marrah, "you live under the protection of Batal; this business of the beastmen may get nasty, but the Snake Goddess will show us what to do when the time comes."

  Thwarted at every turn, Marrah chalked up her grandmother's courage to a failure of imagination. She had heard these same reassurances when she and Arang first came to the city two years ago. Then too the Council of Elders had met in emergency session, and then too the people had frightened one another with stories of impending doom, and what had come of all the worrying? Nothing. Soon life had returned to normal, and except for the priestess who lay in the Dreaming Cave trying to get Batal to speak, everyone went back to thinking about more pleasant things like spring festivals, the children who were about to come of age, the weather, and the crops. No doubt the same process would be repeated. People would worry for a while and rumors would be passed from house to house, but by spring they would have grown bored with the subject. The unlucky village would still be remembered, but gradually people would forget the slaughtered dogs and the trampled crops. They'd begin to think about planting their own fields. Lots would be drawn, the Society for Fertility would tune its drums and gather flowers, streamers of seaweed would be brought to sweeten the land, and there would be no more talk of the sisters who came down from the north to tell of burned mother houses.

  "Do something!" Marrah pleaded at the council meetings. "Do it now before it's too late!" But she was like the young priestess in the memory song, the one who stole a magic eye from the Goddess Earth without waiting for it to be given to her; she could see the future but no one listened. Or rather they listened, but they didn't understand. The elders gave her a respectful hearing, but few of them had ever been as far north as the River of Smoke, and most had never walked out of sight of the sacred coil of the city. The grasslands north of Shambah seemed more like a dream than a real place. They were wise, but they had no idea how fast men on horseback could move. Marrah wouldn't have understood it herself if she hadn't lain by Stavan night after night listening to him talk.

  After a while, she gave up in despair and stopped going to the council meetings. Retreating to one of the temple workshops, she spent the rest of the winter making pottery. She would mix the powdered clay with tempering earth and water, knead it into a smooth paste, roll the warm damp dough between her palms, and begin to build a bowl, starting with a round coil for the base.

  As she worked she thought of nothing but the clay. Sometimes she would chant a prayer: to Amonah if the bowl was to be decorated with water signs, to Xori if birds would fly around it, to Batal or Hessa if she intended to paint a snake coiling from base to rim. She would ask one of the Goddesses to inhabit her hands and give her the grace and power to make the bowl come alive, and when she was done she would set the result on a shelf to dry.

  Later she would decide if the Goddess had heard her prayer, and if the bowl was worthy she would paint it, measuring it first with her fingers so the designs would be pleasingly spaced. She would sit with a row of seashells beside her, dipping a fine brush into crimson, scarlet, pink, orange, yellow, green, brown, gray, black, and as many blues as a week of skies, and when she was finished, she would carry the result outside to an old priestess, who would take it from her and, holding it as gently as an eggshell, put it into the kiln.

  The pottery making kept her sane. As long as her hands were damp with clay and her paints were sitting beside her waiting to be mixed, she could put
the vision of the beastmen out of her mind. But sometimes the outside world intruded into the temple, catching her by surprise. Once when she was making a cup, she suddenly thought of the dolphin cup Olva and Desta had given her on the day she left Gira and how she and Stavan had marveled over it. Her hands trembled and she spoiled a whole morning's work. Bowing her head, she closed her eyes and prayed for more patience and serenity.

  When spring came, she left the temple and with Lalah's permission went to the fields, where she planted the seeds Stavan had sent her, setting aside two small plots, carefully fenced with thorns so no stray sheep or goats would make a meal of the new shoots. Every day she went out to look at them, weeding and watering the new growth by hand when the rains stopped.

  "What are they?" Arang asked one afternoon when she took him with her to eat their midday meal beside the little garden.

  "I have no idea." She shrugged. "A message, perhaps."

  "From Stavan?"

  She nodded.

  Arang bent over the small green plants and poked one finger into the dirt. "I wish he'd come back to us." And putting their arms around each other, he and Marrah stood for a while looking at the garden, wondering what, if anything, the plants would have to say.

  Spring turned to early summer and there was no more news from the north, but the plants grew quickly and by the time the days were long Marrah was finally able to read Stavan's message. One of the seeds produced a small yellow flower, so bitter that when she first tasted it she spat it out in disgust. The other was very much like mint, fragrant and sweet but without the square stems real mint had.

  "They're the cures for redberry fever," she told Arang, handing him a sample of each. "Remember? Stavan said his people used a mint and a bitter yellow flower that grew in the Sea of Grass. He must have found some on his way north and sent the seeds back to us, but why would he do a thing like that when he was in such a hurry?"