The Dark Horse

by Marcus Sedgwick

  Sigurd sneaked a look at Mouse’s face, trying to get at what she meant.

  “All finds are Horn’s property, that’s his right as Lawspeaker.”

  “No, Siggy, I don’t mean that, either. I’m not scared of Horn—”

  “And nor am I,” Sigurd whispered back.

  “I’m scared of the box, Sigurd. The box.”

  Now Sigurd understood. “You felt something? At the beach?”

  Mouse shrugged.

  “I wasn’t sure,” she said defensively, “you know what I’m like . . . sometimes it’s not clear. There might just have been some animal nearby . . . I might have been feeling its fear of us instead. . . .”

  She stopped, sensing something else entirely now. Although she hadn’t lifted her head, she knew Sigurd wasn’t listening to her anymore.

  She looked up. Horn stood in front of her. Gudrun was still speaking, down in the center, by the fire, but as Horn held up his hand she stopped.

  The entire community of Storn was staring at Mouse.

  “Well, girl, what is it? What is it that is more important to you and Olaf the Weakling’s son than the Spell-making?”

  Horn spoke quietly, his voice only just audible over the crackle of the fire, but there was an edge to it that made it clear.

  Mouse trembled.

  “I’m sorry, Horn. We were talking of the poor fishing and the poor finds to be had on the shore. That’s all. I’m sorry.”

  “You. Olaf ’s boy,” said Horn to Sigurd, though he was still staring at Mouse, “what do you say?”

  “That’s all, Horn, just the poor finds along the beach. And the fishing—”

  “They’re lying!”

  Sif. Horn’s daughter.

  Mouse shuddered, fearful of what Sif would do.

  Horn turned and strode to the center of the circle. As he stood by the fire the flames lit his face with an orange glow. He looked terrifying.

  “Well?” he said, staring at his daughter.

  Sif stood up, a little nervously. She hid behind her long black hair. Nevertheless, Mouse could see one of her slate gray eyes fixed right on her.

  Sif knew she was risking embarrassing her father, but she wasn’t going to miss the chance to humiliate Sigurd and Mouse. She disliked them, maybe even hated them. She hated their closeness.

  As she looked at them now, standing next to each other, practically clinging to each other for comfort, the envy rose in her again.

  “Father . . . ,” she began, then remembered where they were. “Lawspeaker . . . they found something on the beach. I saw them.”

  “Go on,” said Horn. Something in his voice indicated he was scared his daughter might embarrass him if she was not careful.

  “They hid it. Sigurd hid it from his own father. She pretended to fall, and he hid it outside the broch.”

  “What was it? Food?”

  A muttering rose from those gathered at the assembly. Sigurd looked toward his parents. Freya, his mother, tried to smile at her son, but then Olaf caught his eye. His father’s face raged with a mixture of shame and anger.

  “No,” said Sif, “it was this.”

  She turned and knelt down. From underneath the blanket she’d been sitting on she produced the box.

  She held it up for everyone to see, and there was silence.

  6

  Of course, she wasn’t called Mouse then.

  When we found her, four summers before she found the box, she wasn’t called anything. She was just a girl we found in a cave full of wolves.

  After a while others noticed what I was looking at. They turned and saw the naked girl, standing in the cave mouth. Still she did not move. Her hair was long and unkempt. She was filthy. She was perhaps seven or eight summers old, but it was hard to tell.

  “What’s this?” asked my father. He came and stood by my side.

  “Look!” I said. “She’s crying!”

  “Poor thing,” said Selva, one of the few women who’d come with us on the war party.

  “It’s a miracle she’s still alive,” said someone else.

  There was confusion. Still the girl stood staring at us, crying quietly. And then I remember very clearly, though I don’t remember who said it:

  “How could a little mouse like that have survived in there? With those animals?”

  A little mouse.

  “They must have been saving her. You know, to eat later.”

  A little mouse. I can’t remember much after that. How we took her home to the village. There was a lot of debate, that I do remember. Argument while we were still on the hill.

  It was obvious we had to take her. Obvious to everyone apart from Horn, that is.

  “Another mouth to feed, that’s all she is,” he said.

  “But we can’t just leave her!” I cried.

  Olaf put his hand over my mouth, but Horn hadn’t even heard me.

  “You don’t have to worry about feeding her,” he said, “I do. I have to see you’re all fed. . . .”

  No one spoke for a while. There was a standoff. Then Father stepped forward.

  “What’s the matter, Lawspeaker?” he said. “Is it beyond your powers to feed a tiny girl like this?”

  Horn must have sensed that the mood was against him, because though he spat on the ground at my father’s feet, he gave in.

  “Very well. But the child will belong to your family, Olaf. It will be on your head.”

  And I do also remember that though we had decided the girl was coming with us, the girl herself had not.

  She had not spoken a word, and then she struggled and fought.

  “She’s out of her mind.”

  “She’s just scared.”

  “Who knows how long she’s been here!”

  But she came with us in the end. The caves were empty, the wolves had gone. It was time to get down off the hill. Before we got home, we had stopped calling her the mouse and just called her Mouse instead.

  That was that.

  We put a cloak around her and left the hill.

  About halfway down the stillness of the evening air was suddenly broken. There was a cry from a wolf high above us. A single long, piercing howl that stopped us in our tracks. It was a sad sound, it seemed to me.

  I looked at Mouse, to see her reaction, but she was still crying. Crying tears of relief, I assumed. But then she held back her tears, sucked in a huge breath, and let out a long, heartbreaking wolf howl.

  We looked at one another, hesitating for a moment, and then we set off again down the hill, a little faster than before.

  Olaf, my father, carried Mouse all the way back to the village on his back.

  I was so proud. And not just of my father, for some reason.

  No one knew then what Mouse was. What she could do.

  Horn thought he was giving us an extra mouth to feed and nothing more, but he was wrong.

  We began to understand when we found her sleeping with the hounds.

  But wait—I am telling this the wrong way round.

  It was hard at first for Mouse.

  Weeks went by. She hadn’t spoken a single word. We thought she was mute. We had cleaned her up. Washed and cut her hair. Found that there was a girl underneath all the dirt, though a strange-looking girl she was. She was small and delicate; she had a small, round, delicate face, with huge and beautiful eyes. She tried to hide behind the hair we had left straggling down in front of her face.

  She didn’t seem to know where she was at first. What she was doing with us. Though she hadn’t spoken, she seemed to understand what we told her. Food, sleep, things like that.

  She would nod her head, or tip it to one side if she wasn’t sure.

  But if anyone tried, and they did try, to ask her anything more complicated, she would just stare blankly through them.

  “When did the wolves capture you, Mouse?” asked Freya, my mother.

  “What’s your name?” asked Olaf, my father.

  “Where are you from? Really
?” I asked.

  Any of these questions brought the same response from Mouse. She would stare through you as if she were looking at something in the distance.

  We decided she was simple. Stupid. Perhaps as a result of being caught by those wolves, we thought. Perhaps it had scared her out of her mind.

  And then one day we lost her.

  She’d been kept in our own broch since we found her. If she went outside, it was with my mother, and only for a short time. She had nothing to do; we’d given her no work, and she would just sit in the darkness of the broch, blinking from time to time. Outside she seemed even more timid.

  “She likes the darkness,” my mother said to my father.

  He nodded.

  “Like the cave,” he said. “Now, why should that be?”

  So we’d grown used to her sitting in the darkest corner of our dark little broch, saying nothing, taking food when offered, sleeping when we did.

  But then, as I say, we lost her.

  My mother said she thought she was still in the broch, but when Father and I came back from fishing, we saw she was not there.

  “But I never saw her leave!” Mother cried. “She was here!”

  We searched all over the village, trying not to attract attention. But it was a busy time of day, with men coming back from fishing and pulling the boats up the beach, and women returning from the fields.

  “Lost something, Olaf?” Herda, the Song-giver, asked my father.

  He held up his hand as if to say, “Be quiet,” but it was too late.

  So Herda and a few others joined the search, and Mouse was found. Sleeping with the hounds in the farthest darkness of the great broch.

  A crowd had gathered as Father pulled Mouse blinking into the light.

  Horn was standing by, a mocking smile on his face.

  “Your daughter prefers the company of dogs?” he said.

  There was laughter. Not kind laughter.

  My father was embarrassed. He shook Mouse angrily by the shoulder. It was one of the few times I saw him angry with her.

  “What are you thinking of ?” he shouted. “Lying with dogs!”

  Then, and then, and then! Mouse spoke for the first time!

  “But they were sad,” she said.

  For a while we were all too amazed that she’d spoken at all, never mind what she had said. Never mind the strange accent to her voice.

  Olaf gathered himself.

  “What did you say?” he asked her.

  “The dogs are sad since Graylegs died,” Mouse said simply, as if it were obvious. Graylegs was one of the older hounds. He had died a couple of days before.

  “What? How do you know they’re sad?” Father asked, bewildered.

  “They told me,” said Mouse.

  Then she asked her first question. That look of confusion she’d had on her face when we first saw her had returned.

  “Why?” she asked. “Don’t they talk to you?”

  7

  In front of a small fire, in a shelter of branches and bracken, the man with white hair and skin rubbed the black palms of his hands together. He felt warm enough, but he shivered, as if with a fever. He spread all his possessions out before him by the jumping firelight.

  First. His knife, the length of a hand, with a different blade on each side, one toothed and one smooth. As good for skinning a goat as cutting a throat.

  Second. Some leather cord, for various purposes.

  Third. A little dried fish.

  Fourth. An oiled bag containing his fire sticks.

  Fifth was the leather bag in which he carried these things. That was all. His only other possessions were his clothes and a charm around his neck, a round metal disc with a picture of a horse on it. How he wished he still had his horse for this task . . . but she had died when he was only a year into his journey.

  He’d been heading north when the ship ran aground on the reef in the storm. It had irritated him to learn that he’d already passed the place, had gone too far south. He’d had to find a ship heading back the way he’d come.

  None of the traders whose ship it was seemed to have survived the shipwreck. It hadn’t been far to the shore, but they’d all been drunk. He’d despised them for it as he clung desperately to the box with one arm and swam inland with the other, the cord of his leather bag tightening around his neck with every stroke.

  So he’d go on going north. It was always possible the box had been washed out to sea while he lay unconscious on the beach, but he didn’t think so. He’d seen footsteps near him in the sand, though the tide had washed most of them away, and there was no trail to follow. Besides, he’d come too far to fail. He had to succeed. And he had to have the box to do it.

  Without it he felt anxious. It was his reason for being here; in a way it was simply his reason for being. After years of traveling, and so close to the end of his journey, he’d lost it.

  He held the charm in his hand and vowed he would find the box. It was too cold to sleep tonight, but before the sun had set on him tomorrow, he would find the box. He shivered again, and a drop of sweat fell from his forehead into his eye. He ignored it, his mind on more important things.

  No one else knew what the box held, and even if they did, he was safe enough for now. The box had its own protection.

  8

  After Sif had produced the box, Horn had shouted at Mouse and Sigurd. And after Horn had shouted at them, Olaf had shouted at them, in front of everyone. After that people had begun to be more interested in the box itself, and Mouse and Sigurd had fled the great broch, Sif laughing at them, and Freya chasing after Sigurd, trying to console him.

  Mouse had no idea where Sigurd was now. It seemed he didn’t want even her around. But it wasn’t just his fault that Sif had seen him hide the box. They’d been careless. Mouse wondered what was in the box. Horn would find out now and keep whatever treasures were inside it.

  Mouse had crept into one of the small brochs used as a grain store. She’d put her blanket up onto the pile of wheat and gone to sleep. She’d done it before. It was a place she came to whenever she needed to hide. She wasn’t allowed to sleep with the dogs, so she came here. Not even Siggy knew. If she heard anyone coming, she’d learned how to wriggle down into the grain and hide, and if a few last ears of wheat spilled onto the floor as whoever it was opened the door, they’d say, “Just a mouse,” not knowing how right they were.

  The last time Mouse had hidden in the grain, not that long ago, she’d had to throw her blanket onto the top of the pile, and herself after it. This time she’d only had to step up onto it. They were using up their stores of wheat. The fishing was very bad, and it was a long time till Harvest-month. Olaf had dared to mention this at a gathering in the great broch, and Horn had savaged him with words.

  “You’d have my people starve?” Horn roared. “They must eat something.”

  Horn played up to the assembly, and it worked. They muttered their support. They were tired of being hungry and of worrying about being hungry.

  Olaf tried to argue, but it was no good.

  “If we eat all our wheat now,” he said calmly, “then we shall starve.”

  Horn turned really nasty then.

  “If you continue to spread these ill omens, they will come true. The fishing will improve soon, thanks to Gudrun’s spells! I suggest you concentrate on finding sea cabbage, the task I gave to you. Then we’d have something to eat!”

  Mouse took her blanket with her as she crept out of the grain store at first light. She passed the low stable where Skinfax, Horn’s horse, lived. Horn had bartered half a year’s worth of wheat for that scraggy horse from some traders. It was the Storn’s only horse; they had no use for one, but it was typical of Horn that he should think he needed one. She heard Skinfax give a low whinny as she passed.

  “Shhh,” she whispered, and put out a calming thought to the animal. He snorted, and Mouse walked on.

  She crossed the scrubby fields where they grew the wheat an
d other stunted vegetables, and made her way up the hills behind the village.

  She was heading for the stones on Bird Rock, and within an hour she was there. The sun had climbed with her, and for the first time in weeks it was going to be a warm day. The sun glinted off the sea way below her, casting it a rich blue.

  By the time she got to the top of the hill, she was hot. She took her clothes off and flung them in a pile at the foot of one of the huge stones. The stones pointed far away into the sky high above her. They were huge, jagged fingers of rock that formed a rough circle. Some slightly taller or wider than others, there was nothing precise about them.

  It was said that however many times you counted them, you would always come up with a different number, but Mouse knew that was rubbish. She counted them often enough to know there were seven of them. They had been there forever—no one knew what they were or who had erected them.

  No one else came up here much, only Gudrun, but she never emerged from her tiny hut before midday. It was something to do with being awake late at night making the spells work. The rest of the village feared the place. It seemed a place of magic to them, ancient magic that they did not understand. More than that, it was the place they took their Lawspeakers upon death.

  Gudrun, thought Mouse. The Wisewoman. Olaf ’s hound, Frost, would make a better Wisewoman! The sea gave no fish, the crops were poor, and still everyone put their faith in Gudrun. But in Storn there were reasons for everything, and Gudrun’s invulnerable position was no exception to this.

  Feeling sorry for herself, Mouse lay in the heather. Instinctively she curled into a ball and began to lick the backs of her hands, as if cleaning them, like a dog, like a wolf, though they were not dirty. After a while she realized what she was doing and made herself stop. Olaf and Freya would be cross if they knew. She rolled onto her back and stared at the sky instead.

  There! A crow.

  In a moment Mouse left her body and flew up to the bird. With that crow’s mind she swung high, surveying the whole coastline. There lay the village. Even from a thousand feet high she could see Olaf setting off with Frost along the shore. What for? She didn’t know. There was Freya, pulling a bucket of water from the burn. There was Thorbjorn, the blacksmith, an ally of Olaf ’s. The village was up and awake now, and there . . . there was the thin figure of Gudrun, leaving Horn’s private broch. At this time of the morning! No doubt Horn had been asking her advice on a point of magic.