by Judith Tarr
“In their hunting the Dragon’s children found the country he favored most. He loved to fly through the mountains, dancing on the wind above the high pastures and riding the long airs down onto the steppes of Asia. He made storms there, stitched the sky with lightning and heaped up hail like a conqueror’s piles of skulls.
“There was a valley, very green in season, in which he would lie on fair days from morning till evening, spreading his wings and basking in the sun. They laid a trap for him there, and waited with hunters’ patience for him to fall into it.
“Close by this place were the summer pastures of an old tribe of horse people. Women still ruled them, even in that age of the world, and they worshipped a goddess in the form of a mare.”
“Which of the mares was it?”
We all stared at Caro. I wouldn’t have thought of that at all.
“Matina,” I said before I realized I was talking. “It was Matina.”
Elissa nodded. “She had her own cult, as every god did. These were breeders of horses; as long as she lived with them, they believed their line, both horse and human, could never die.”
I could see it. I could feel Matina, listening and giving me what she knew—what she’d felt and done. She’d been waiting for this. Saving it, to give it to me whole.
18
It was a windy place, a long rolling plain with a rim of mountains. Not too different from the high country in Arizona, but colder. It was a lot farther north and on the other side of the world.
Humans there might have heard of the hot, marshy country between two rivers. Some of their tribes might have ruled it when their turn came around, but that was a while ago. They were nomads again, following the horse herds and worshipping their goddess in the form of a grey mare.
Matina’s name was in a different language then. Later it went into Latin, then got mumbled and shortened, but she remembered what it meant. Stella Matutina. Morning Star.
She knew the god of storms and thunder. He treated her with the courtesy she deserved: he respected her territory and never offered to trespass. But sometimes, when she was in the mood, she might be a slight bit more welcoming.
On one particular day, she felt inclined to wander off from the herds toward a finger of pasture that pointed up toward the mountains. None of the other horses followed her.
The grass was so green it glowed in the early-morning light. She glowed even brighter against it, with her silver-white coat.
She grazed, because hunger is always there in a horse, and the stomach breaks down if there isn’t something working its way through it. Even a goddess was subject to that quirk of equine biology.
The other quirk, the reason she was there, was almost as strong as the urge to eat. She angled herself to the wind, lifted her tail and let it know what she had in mind.
He was riding that wind, with no particular purpose except the kind of pure thoughtless joy that a god could know. He had no shape; he was air and light, with a shimmer of wings.
The scent of her brought him around with a snap of sudden, total attention. His essence coalesced into four legs, an arch of neck, a mane like a streamer of cloud. He swooped down out of the deep blue heaven, and touched the ground with hard round hooves.
I recognized him even in that half-form: small round grey horse with a big dark eye and a planet’s worth of attitude. He danced in front of Matina, courting her—he was too wise to mares to try to take her without her permission.
She ignored him. He needed the lesson, and the grass was sweet.
He was wise to that, too. He’d visited her before, and learned that if he was patient and showed respect, she might—might—let him have that he wanted.
She was thinking about it. Her tail flicked restlessly. She grazed closer to where he was snatching small tense bits of grass, doing his best to be casual about it.
She tilted an ear. Slanted her tail in a particular way.
He leaped.
She squealed in outrage. If he’d been an actual stallion he might have ended up a gelding, but he was a god, and he was fast. He staggered back in shock and mortal embarrassment. He’d lost control of himself, and she was not having it.
He wasn’t nearly embarrassed enough. She went after him in pure white wrath. She chased him clear to the end of the valley, where it narrowed to a steep grassy cleft with a sliver of sky. He dropped his horse shape there and spread wings, and flew for his life.
She spun and threw one last kick at the air where he had been, and trotted back down into the sun. Her temper was settling finally—it always was lightning quick when she was in season.
She would never admit to embarrassment, but she was a little contrite, maybe. He hadn’t been that impertinent. Just a little too fast with his favors.
She had no intention of apologizing, but the day was still young and she was restless, and none of the stallions in the herds appealed to her. She shifted her own shape till it was as light as a drift of cloud, and directed the wind to carry it toward the high country.
He was up there, she was sure, nursing his wounds to body and pride and washing himself clean with sunlight. She might oblige him after all, or she might let him bask in her beauty.
The hunters had been lying in wait for days. Some of them were losing patience; they’d argued, earlier in the morning, and almost half were ready to leave and go actively looking for the Dragonslayer.
When he came, streaming sparks and rolling with thunder, they pulled together with impressive speed. Their net was half rope and half spells, very old spells that the Dragon had left them, made to bind a god.
He ran head-on into it. It pulled him up short and sent him somersaulting in a flurry of wings and limbs and tangling cords.
He erupted out of the net in what must have been pure instinct—and the spell caught him. It turned his lightning to surges of dark fire, and bent them inward, driving them deep into his immortal body.
The hunters closed in. Matina, hovering as a drift of cloud, saw death coiling around them.
Even a god could die, if the magic was strong enough. This was the Dragon’s own. Age didn’t weaken that kind of power. It made it stronger.
Matina could have left him to it. Gods came and went with the winds of human belief and their own incessant fighting. He’d saved the world once, it was true, but that was ages ago.
Still. It was her fault he was there, and seriously her fault that he’d come running without any thought in his head but getting away from her. Guilt and goddesses tended not to go together, but she had her own sense of fairness.
She couldn’t break the spell. It was much too strong. She could slow it down enough to keep him alive—for a while.
The hunters had paid a price already for what they’d done: their spell had drawn some of its strength from them. They wound the net as tight as it would go, set guards over it who had to fight to stay awake, and made camp in the field. In the morning, they told each other, they’d take what was left of the Dragonslayer back to their temple. He’d be no more than ash and bone, small enough to fit into a beggar’s bowl.
Matina didn’t care for shame, and class distinctions were beneath her. But a god reduced to ash was an indignity she had no intention of condoning.
She called the wind and made wings of it, and flew back to her children. They didn’t need much persuading. It had been a while since the last raid, and the young ones were restless.
The night was well along by the time Matina’s children stormed the valley. The guards had fallen over exhausted, but the prisoner in the net was nearly done. His wings had shriveled and begun to crumble. His struggles were no more than gasps and an increasingly infrequent convulsion. The spark of his immortality had almost gone out.
The hunters woke up to war. While the humans flailed away at each other, Matina, still more cloud than mare, swirled around the net and the captive.
She’d gambled that if he was weak enough, so would the spell be. But if she was too slow, or she misju
dged the balance between dying god and fading magic, there wouldn’t be anything left of him to save.
The battle rang and clashed away from them both, which suited her perfectly. She called a bit of the sun to turn the net to ash. He crumbled with it, crushed by the weight of the spell.
There was almost nothing left of him: a little dust, a shadow, the white glimmer of a bone. She did all she could do, which was to wrap him in her own essence and sweep him away out of the fight, over the mountain and onto the steppe and under the open sky.
When she was so far away even her divine senses couldn’t hear or see the battle, she drifted down to the grass. She’d thought to give him to the wind and let it carry the last of him wherever it had a mind. But when she felt the earth under her, and her own body solidifying from hooves to ears, she felt another thing, a last spark of I want to be.
That spark made a new spell, and spun it out of her essence. Because that essence, here, had the form of a grey mare, the spell made a shape that was as close to it as magic could manage.
What lay in the grass was too small almost to see, but it was alive. The parts of it were growing, expanding, adding on to themselves. With each expansion, they were a little more like a horse, or the seed of a horse.
She took the tiny thing inside herself, where it would be safe, and where it could latch on and draw nourishment and grow. In the next year it would come back out into the world, and it would look like a foal: round and compact, jet black but with a sprinkling of white hairs around the eyes. A year or two after that, he’d be grey shading to white, and he’d be chasing after the mares again, with no memory of what he’d been or how he’d got there.
She remembered. He was in all ways a normal stallion, except for one thing. When she made her spell, she made it out of herself, and she wasn’t mortal. That meant that neither was he.
On that first day, when she essentially conceived a god, she knew what would come, because she was a mare and a goddess, but she was also firmly installed in the present. Her children came galloping down off the mountain, with too many empty saddles, but they’d won. The Dragon’s children were beaten, and the few survivors had crawled away.
She led them all the way back to their own pastures, and they mourned their dead and celebrated their heroes and went on living as they’d always lived.
And that would have been the whole of the story, except that the Dragon’s children couldn’t let well enough alone. The hunters who survived found the ashes of the net, still holding their shape until the wind blew them away. They saw the emptiness in the middle, and told themselves the spell was done. The Dragonslayer was destroyed.
They took the story home and called on everyone to celebrate, but one of their priestesses, who was old and fierce and powerful, blasted them for idiots. “He is still alive! I feel him in the earth, like a seed of corruption. Why didn’t you crush him? He was almost gone. Almost! And you let him go.”
The least sorely wounded of the survivors, who wasn’t the best fighter—he’d escaped by hiding behind a rock till the battle was over—thrust out his chest and blustered at her. “Did we? Did we, then? Where is he? Can you tell us that?”
She couldn’t, and that drove her straight out of her head. She beat him till he screamed for mercy, laid a curse on them all, and flung herself off the nearest escarpment.
She might be dead, but the curse lived. None of them or any of their descendants could rest until they found the Dragonslayer and finished what they began. The shape of that curse was a thing like a shark of the air, an invisible predator, all hunger and teeth: a hunter to finish what the ancient hunters had failed to do.
19
“That was a long time ago,” I said in the quiet room with its wonderful smells. “Centuries. Millennia. Obviously they never found him. Do they know what form he’s been living in?”
“That’s been kept from them,” Elissa said, “but they’ve been able to sense the old magic that’s never left him. They’ve come close too many times, but never close enough to catch him.”
I turned it all over in my head, while the others sat still, waiting. I finally understood what the hunter was. I got the part about the curse, and the part about ancient revenge. I’m a historian; I know how tradition can set itself in stone.
But there was something missing from the pattern. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Philippe and Elissa exchanged glances. Deciding whose turn it was, I supposed. Or playing a mental game of rock-paper-scissors.
She let her breath out in a sharp hiss. “They want to bring the Dragon back. There’s nothing to stop them, or to keep her from swallowing us all whole, except the one who stopped her before.”
“But he’s a horse,” I said, “and he doesn’t remember—” My brain caught up with my mouth. “Oh, hell.”
“Exactly,” Elissa said. “If he’s found one of his other forms again, then that means the Dragon is coming. And when she does . . .”
Apocalypse, no waiting.
Bel was a weapon. And he was living in my pasture. Under deep cover, with every possible protection, but the closer the Dragon came, the harder it would be to hide him. Especially if he woke up to himself and decided to take the battle to her.
I could see him doing that. He wouldn’t stop to think about consequences. Stallions don’t, and I don’t think gods do, either.
“It’s not just the Dragon we have to worry about,” I said. “What if I back out? What if I tell you I never signed on for this and I’ll never be up for it?”
They all stared at me, Caro included. The waitress brought another round of food, different moles with chicken and pork and shrimp, with rice and tortillas.
I wasn’t hungry, but I nibbled on a shrimp, letting myself focus on the sweet briny taste underneath the smoke and the spice and the chocolate. It was real and immediate. It wasn’t this thing that the mares and their minions had dumped on me.
I could have been a lot angrier than I was. My Mesopotamian dreams had told me enough to guess what I’d gotten into. When I saw Bel in the moonlight, I knew I’d dreamed true.
If I could have backed out, that would have been the time. I swallowed the last of the shrimp and took a sip of the milky horchata that had come in with it. “Tell me how he ended up in Arizona. He was in France, right? What drove him out?”
“We’re not sure,” Philippe said. “Mother hadn’t been ill, that anyone knew. Then suddenly she was dead, and the horses were on their way to us.”
“Maybe it was a betrayal,” Elissa said with an edge that told me they’d had this argument a hundred times before. “She was alone except for a few of the house and stable staff. We were on tour. Maybe it was luck, or maybe finally, after all these centuries, the hunters found a clue. Whatever happened, you know they killed her.”
“There’s no proof,” he said, as he must have a hundred times over. “All we know is that she sent the horses to us in Canada, with no instructions except what you’d expect—feed, care—and no message. Then the housekeeper found her in the morning, gone in her sleep.”
“Murdered.” Elissa waved off anything else he would have said, with a gesture like a slap. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Canada wasn’t safe, either: we found one of the hunters lurking near the farm, spying on the people who came and went.”
“Looking for someone in human form,” Philippe said.
“Maybe,” Elissa said. “So we looked for a place so strong in itself and so full of ancient spirits that the Dragon’s spell would be impossible to detect.”
“None of which will matter at all if he erupts out of it like the wrath of a much later and more persistent God,” Caro pointed out. “It seems to me he’s more of a potential problem than the Dragon or her followers. They don’t seem to be in a tearing hurry to take the world apart. He, on the other hand . . .”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about the lack of hurry,” I said. “Something’s been hunting around here since before the horses came t
o the ranch.”
“Some thing?” Caro frowned. “The hunters are human, aren’t they?”
“Not all of them,” I said.
Philippe was busy finishing off the last of the mole. Elissa turned her half-full glass of horchata around and around, as if it were the most important thing in the world.
I was this close to walking the hell out. The only things that kept me there were the fact that they were my only transport back to the hotel, and a certain amount of boneheaded stubbornness.
I took a deep breath. “You’re not going to scare me off by this point. I got past the shitting-pants stage before I left the ranch. Just tell me the rest of it. You stuck me at ground zero, you owe me that much.”
It was Philippe who answered, a little to my surprise. “There’s nothing really to tell. Hunters’ descendants are human, yes. They’re mostly corporate now. Headhunters. Executives. Spies. They use modern tools. Magic is too old-fashioned for them.”
“You think so?”
Elissa looked up. Her face just then reminded me of the mare’s children when they rode to the battle. She was darker than they’d been—their descendants had ridden to the Mediterranean and put down roots there—but the angles of the bones, the way she held her head: those went a long way back.
“We’re not all that we used to be, either,” she said. “We’ve kept the horses hidden, given them what they needed or asked for, kept the memories in our heads more than in books, because books can be stolen or burned. The enemy never found us, because the horses would warn us. Until they found Mother.”
“Which is why I don’t think they did,” Philippe said. “She knew she was sick. She made sure the horses were safe, and then she let go.”
Elissa shook her head. He pushed on before she could speak. “They would have warned us. And they didn’t. They’ve been acting as ordinary as horses can act. No sign, no indication, that there’s danger.”