by Judith Tarr
I showed Ricky around before I cross-tied him for grooming and saddling. He checked out the new stall mats and the fresh paint on the walls, poked his nose into the feed room and the tack room and the still empty but pristinely clean breeding lab, and whuffled his approval.
I was sorry to mess up the pretty new place with pasture dirt, but there was a brand-new broom for that. The crew had seen to everything. Even the crossties were new.
My contribution was a freshly cleaned saddle and bridle and a clean pad on a clean horse. Show-ready we weren’t, but we wouldn’t disgrace the place, either.
The path down to the wash was newly graded, and the weeds and cactus cut back. But once we’d gone down the short but sharp slope into the wide sandy riverbed, we were back in familiar territory.
When the rains come, the wash is the last place you want to be. You never know when the wall of water will come roaring down off the mountain, sometimes twenty or thirty feet deep.
In dry season it’s the best way to get from here to there in the desert. It’s mostly flat, it’s clean sand, there’s not much brush or cactus. Everything on feet uses the wash as a highway, and things with wings hunt over it.
It’s wonderful for riding. You can go for miles and miles, clear to Phoenix if you’re really determined and have a week or two to do it.
Humans have been living along these washes for thousands of years. Before the white man came with his guns and his diseases, there were chains of cities all up and down the rivers.
I turned Ricky toward one of the old villages. The Tucson valley is one huge archaeological site; you can’t dig anywhere without finding some sign of ancient inhabitants. Out here on the ranch, an expedition from the university had dug up part of a village, with a round pit house and the corner of a burial ground.
Yes. Real Native American burial ground. Hohokam, in this case: the ones who came before the ones the white people drove out.
It was one of the most peaceful places I knew. Whoever the old people had been, they hadn’t left any trauma here. They’d lived and died in their round houses, tending their fields and making their pottery and trading all the way down into Mexico and clear up to the Pacific Northwest.
A mesquite bosque has grown up around the ruins, which are mostly just hollows in the ground or lines of rocks that mark the fields. The one house that’s been excavated sits near the middle; the graveyard is farther up the wash toward the mountain. After checking out the bones there, the archaeologists had buried them again, calling in a tribal elder to make sure the old ones weren’t offended.
As far as I could tell, they hadn’t been. They didn’t mind me, either, when I slipped Ricky’s bridle off and his halter on and let him graze on what little was left of the summer grass. I sat on the low wall of the pit house and took the little horse out of my pocket.
He’d gone everywhere with me since he came. I was very careful not to drop or lose him, but I let him sit in my hand while I soaked up the peace of the place.
It felt like the deep breath before a long leap into space. The land was almost suspiciously quiet, now the crew had left. Everything, in the place inside where I did my seeing, was perfectly still.
I kept remembering one thing Ohana had said. It slid by me at the time, but came back later, while I ate breakfast with my little horse for company.
“The lord and his ladies,” she said. It wasn’t so strange to talk about horses that way, but the way she said it made me keep coming back to it.
Maybe because I’d been feeling like the lady of the manor with all the vassals giving gifts. Now I wondered if it wasn’t that I was the royal; it was the horses. Which made me the seneschal of the castle.
None of the paperwork assigned them a breed. There weren’t registration papers. The import documents said Chevaux originaux. Which could have meant anything from that they were foaled in France to that they were some obscure native breed that no one outside their immediate vicinity had ever heard of.
The blurry photos attached to the papers didn’t tell me much. Four legs, non-mule-length ears, a blaze here and a sock there. If they were anything special, they weren’t showing it for the camera.
All I could do was take my cue from the land, and keep quiet and wait. I rounded up Ricky, convinced him to let his bridle back on, and set off down the wash. Riding into the sunset. Or in our case, taking a loop through one of the smaller washes, with a bit of trot and one grand, head-clearing gallop, till we turned back home in search of dinner.
6
I got more done in that last week and a bit than I had in a year. I finished two whole articles. I did a handful of phone readings—old clients, nobody new, and no animals needing rescue. Emma rode Ricky, test-driving the beautiful new arena footing, and on the weekend we went riding up the mountain, with me on Rosie.
Two days before the horses were due to come in, the weather broke. Eighty-five degrees in the afternoon, warm and windy overnight. Clouds rolling in by morning. By noon they were deep blue and billowing over the ridge.
I got the equines in and battened, especially Aziza with her ancient bones. I offered her a blanket, and for once she didn’t act insulted.
I’d just got the last strap fastened when it hit. Wind like a knife and sleet whipping down off the mountain. The light jacket I’d had the smarts to put on though it was quite a bit too warm was suddenly quite a bit not warm enough.
There’s Arizona weather. Hotter than hell and drier than a bone for months on end, but when it decides to change its mind, you’ve got twenty minutes to change yours.
The equines had hay and a roof. Their stalls were in the middle, where the wind couldn’t quite reach. Rosie and Ricky finally had a use for the winter coats they’d been sweating in all month. As long as they stayed dry, they’d be warm and happy.
I pulled the hood up over my head and sprinted for the house. The wind tried to knock me over. Spits of ice stung my bare legs.
The huge thing that had been hunting overhead the day I met Elissa and Philippe was back. It sailed on the wind, making the clouds feel darker and the wind even colder.
I dived into the house. It was warm and dry and strikingly quiet, even with the gale howling around it. All its protections were armed, but I brewed a pot of jasmine tea to make them stronger, tossing in a few blossoms from the plant that lived in the shelter of the back deck, and curled up on the sagging old couch.
The flowers’ sweetness filled my head and cleared it. The hot tea warmed me all the way down.
All three cats piled on top of me. They were guardians, too. Little Roswitha was fluffed up to twice her usual size, hissing at the ceiling.
I finally stopped shivering. The thing in the air circled a time or two more, then the wind blew it away.
There is such a thing as coincidence. I didn’t think this was it. Whatever I’d gotten myself into was getting weirder by the day, and this part of it was scary. I started to wonder if my lovely salary was hazard pay.
It was just a feeling. I poured the last cup of tea and reached for the laptop, juggling cats. “Work now,” I said to them. “Wibble later.”
It was a wild, wet, brutal night, and a bleak, bone-chillingly cold morning. I had to remember where I’d stowed my jeans back in March, and dig out a sweatshirt to go under my jacket. The path down to the mare motel was still more water than sand. I picked my way along the edges.
None of the lovely new repairs had let go. The hay was dry in its barn, and all the fences were still up. The outdoor riding ring had a puddle here and there, but most of it had drained nicely.
My equines were hungry, and Ricky was eager to get out of his stall and smear himself with mud. “Eat first,” I said, hard-hearted.
The hunter in the air was long gone. Everything was peaceful, with the cold, astringent scent of winter rain in the desert.
I drank it in. This was the last day, for who knew how long, of just me and the girls and Ricky. I’d made a promise to myself to stop and savor t
he quiet. No matter how well-behaved the new horses might be, or how well my equines tolerated them, it was still a change. A big one, if you were a horse.
If you were a human, too.
And maybe even if you were an Old One. The spirit by the palo verde had never focused in any one direction. It existed all over this land, guarding it by simply being in it.
This morning it almost had a face. That almost-face turned west. It was still purely calm, but there was a hint of watchfulness underneath.
The horses were coming from the west, from California. I hadn’t heard anything, but I was trying to relax about it. Horse haulers, like vets and farriers, live in a separate subuniverse, where they make their own version of spacetime. They’d get here when they got here.
This place wasn’t going anywhere, but I had to eat, and the cats were low on food again. I made sure I had my phone with me, and that it was charged. Then I forayed out into the aftermath of the storm.
The big wash had run overnight, but was down to a shallow trickle when I splashed through it. There were new potholes all along the road, and Sometime Pond, where the road turned through a thicket of mesquite, was almost full.
I’d better hope it all drained and cleared before the van came in. A couple of crossings could get tricky for anything large or heavy and on wheels. My pickup skated a little across the last one before the main road.
Even the paved road wasn’t a sure thing after a storm this size. I found signs of flash flooding, fans of mud and debris where creeks and washes crossed the road. Our favorite sign around here, DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, tilted at an angle where the ranch access turned onto the main road.
I was even more reluctant than usual to leave the ranch. The whole thing is miles on a side, but the western edge of what I consider core territory, which includes the horse facilities and my house, was the creek I’d just crossed.
I stopped on the far side of it and slid out of the truck. The sun had punched its way through the clouds; the wind was sharp. Something looked off—a little too bright, a little too empty.
Then I saw the ancient, crooked-armed saguaro that guarded the crossing. It lay in pieces along the bank, scorched and charred.
Lightning had broken the trunk in three; the arms were scattered a hundred feet down the creekbed. The crooked one lay at an angle across the creek. Like a gate, closing off whatever had tried to come from the west.
Grief struck, as sharp as a death in the human or animal family. I’d called her Elder Sister; she was at least two hundred years old, and full of birds and bats and squirrels, a whole community as broken and scattered as her big green-white spiky body.
Lightning happens. Storms are hard on things that grow in the desert, even the saguaro—and the older they are, the more vulnerable they get. But this didn’t feel accidental.
I’d been half numb, half nervous. Now I was angry. The kind of cold, still anger that lasts.
Whatever had done this, for whatever godforsaken reason, I was going to find it. And when I found it, I was going to rip it to pieces.
An eye for an eye. An arm for a crushed and storm-blasted arm.
7
Dorrie showed up on my doorstep the next morning, driving the truck I’d last seen Elissa and Philippe in. It was loaded with tack boxes and odd shapes wrapped in tarps.
“They’re about three hours behind me,” she said with a finely honed sense of priorities. Then she came for the hug and the squee and the “Holy crap, where did you come from? I had no idea.”
“They needed a driver at the last minute,” she said, “and I had a break in the schedule. Also, somewhat of a responsibility to the family, to make sure everything’s in order.”
“You couldn’t resist,” I translated. I stood for a bit and grinned at her.
Dorrie and I talk or email constantly, but we don’t see each other in person nearly as often as we’d like. It had been over a year since she was last in Tucson, and I hadn’t been traveling much. At all.
She’s older than I am, and not at all what you might expect from the gigs she works and the clients she sends me. She’s never had any work done: she’s comfortable with the face she’s been living in for the past fifty-odd years. When she dyes her hair, it’s green or magenta or, that morning, iridescent purple.
Dorrie is the mind behind half a dozen of everybody’s favorite tv shows. She can get away with being whatever she feels like being, no matter how weird or off-trend, because she makes money. Lots and lots and lots of beautiful money.
It hasn’t changed her. She’s still the person I met back in grad school. Horses aren’t her thing. Like some people who grow up around them, she’d got them out of her system by the time she escaped to college.
Nobody’s perfect. I’ll listen to her go on about dogs because she can be patient with my fixation on horses. We have plenty else to talk about, from the state of the woo to the condition of the world.
I climbed into the pickup with her and rode down to the barn to unload the tack boxes. The bundles turned out to be a two-wheeled cart and what looked like a racing sulky, till we hauled out the rest of it.
“A chariot?” I said. “We’re remaking Ben-Hur now?”
“It’s one of the spares from the Cirque,” she said. “Haven’t you ever wanted to ride in one?”
“Well . . .” I said.
We stowed the boxes in the tack room and the cart and the chariot in one of the spare stalls. By the time we finished, we were sweating in the damp chilly air.
I took Dorrie up to the house for tea and sandwiches. The van was still a couple of hours out: slowdown on the highway.
I hate delays. This one made me even twitchier than I was already. I drank too much tea and picked at my sandwich, till Dorrie said, “Calm down. They’ll get here.”
“Someday.” I pushed my plate away. “This is a mistake. I don’t know a damned thing about managing a horse herd. I’ve never handled a stallion. I don’t—”
“Hey,” said Dorrie, while I kept on babbling. “Hey!”
I shut up.
“That’s better,” she said. “You really can do this, you know. Elissa thinks so. So does Ohana. They’re hard to impress.”
“So,” I said. “You lied like hell to get me this job. Because otherwise—”
“I told them the truth,” she said. “Screwups and all. It’s the screwups that did it.”
I was one breath short of throwing the teapot at her. It wasn’t a reasonable reaction, or a rational one, but I wasn’t either of those things just then. “All right. That’s enough. This is a joke, isn’t it? You’ve punked me good and proper.”
“No joke,” Dorrie said. “You screw up because you tell the truth. You see the truth. That’s what these horses need.”
“Why?”
Dorrie knows me. She had to have been expecting that question. She slid around it. “Have you ever met an animal who didn’t?”
I’d have backed her against the wall if I hadn’t suddenly been so tired I could hardly keep my head up. It hits me like that sometimes: all the energy drains out of me.
I clutched my empty teacup and concentrated on breathing. Eventually the fit passed. By then, so had the confrontation. Dorrie started playing with Catiline and her favorite string, and we settled back into our old easy company.
I was afraid the horses wouldn’t get here till after dark, but when the van finally rounded the turn toward the barn, there were still a couple of hours of daylight.
It was a genuine, high-end horse van, the twelve-horse model with the living quarters and the side exits as well as the usual one in back. Rosie came to me in one, to the horror of the horses she traveled with; the first I saw of her, she was mocking them with every tilt of her magnificent ears.
There weren’t any mules in this load. Elissa was driving, with Philippe and Ohana for crew. They pulled up in front of the barn, almost exactly where I’d sat the night of the barbecue.
I could hear the horses moving i
nside: bodies shifting, breath blowing out in a snort. Up toward the front, as soon as the van stopped, one of them started pawing.
I could guess which one that was.
I deliberately wasn’t trying to hear them with anything but my ears. I needed my mind to be clear, and that meant being present in the world everyone else lived in.
Philippe took his time opening one of the side doors. I glimpsed a long elegant head and alert ears.
“Barn for them tonight,” Elissa said.
She spoke my mind. We’d have a freeze by sunup, or close to it. Not the best weather for turning a herd of horses loose in an open pasture, after they’d been living in sunny California.
I had the stalls ready and waiting for them. Shavings spread on the clean new mats, water barrels filled, hay in the feeders.
Philippe led the first mare down the ramp. The plate on her halter said AEMILIA.
She was a golden dun, with a metallic sheen on her coat, and she was smaller than I’d been expecting. If she was fifteen hands, I’d be surprised. But there was plenty to her, as elegant as she was. She didn’t walk or act small. She paced down that ramp like a tiger.
She knew I was there, but she had other things to think about just then: drinking in all the new smells, mapping the world she’d come into. We’d talk later, we both agreed.
Elissa brought Illyria out behind her: a dark bay, almost black, with a star on her forehead. She was taller, sturdier. Aemilia was built for speed. Illyria was built to go all day.
The other mares fell in between the two: Eneida and Matina, chestnut and grey, looked as if they belonged to the cart that Dorrie and I had unloaded, strong but elegant. Alicia and Zenobia were matched roans, blue as steel; I could see them racing around a hippodrome with the chariot.
They were beautiful, high-bred, imperious mares, and they took charge of the place from the minute they set foot on it. My equines down by the mare motel were eerily quiet. Even Ricky stood in the pasture and watched, but didn’t run or buck or scream.