by Judith Tarr
She crept out onto the riverbank. The stars were bright overhead. The moon was rising, huge white full moon.
Sparrow’s breath caught. This—this was—
Moonrise. It led her along the river past the eddy, then inland to the fields of grass.
She was awake, she was not dreaming. And yet this was like a dream: vividly, almost painfully clear, and yet oddly remote.
She knew where she was going. To the grass. To the steppe, and the herds of horses.
oOo
The horses went where they would. The People followed. That was the way of the world, as it had been since the dawn time.
The herd that she knew best was the smallest. It had come in a few seasons before, as strays: mares without a stallion, searching for a new protector. The king of stallions had taken them in, mated with them and made them his own.
He thought he ruled them. But since they came, they and not the king led the herds in the great round of the year. They chose the pastures in each season. They drove off other mares and kept the king for themselves.
The men seemed not to know what the mares had done. That these strays were different, even the greatest fool could see. They were white or grey or dappled like the moon. Their foals all seemed ordinary at birth: black or bay, dun or brown. But as they grew, they paled, dappled, whitened.
Some of the shamans wondered if they might not be the gods’ own. But Sparrow’s father, the great shaman, Drinks-the-Wind, scoffed at such a thought. “All horses are sacred,” he said. “These are strays, wanderers off the steppe—odd as to color, but ordinary enough else.”
Drinks-the-Wind was truly a shaman as his son was not, but in this, Sparrow thought, he had no vision. Maybe because they were mares, he could not see what they were. The moon shone through them. The night wind sang in their manes.
There was one in particular. She was young; she had been born after the herd came to the People—born, in fact, at Sparrow’s feet, on a night of the full moon, when the feet of gods trod the earth, and their voices whispered in the heavens. When she was a foal she was black dun—rare enough among horses, but not unheard of. But as she grew, as with the others, her color had faded, paling and dappling to silver.
Now, in her fourth summer, she was like the moon at the full. Other foals of her year had bred and borne foals of their own this spring, but she had cast off the young stallions who importuned her. Her sire, who might have driven her off as he had the rest of his daughters, had made no move against her. She grazed with her mother and her aunts and her sisters who had come to the herd from elsewhere, ran and played with the foals and the yearlings, squealed and tormented the lesser stallions.
It was she who always greeted Sparrow’s arrival, lifting her head and calling as a mare calls to her foal: soft but peremptory. From the moment of her birth, she had looked to Sparrow, trailed after her when she walked through the herd, learned from her how frail and yet how strong a human creature could be.
She had grown up strong, and she had grown up beautiful. On this night she came to Sparrow under the rising moon, a white shining creature like the dream of a god.
And yet she was a living creature. She was warm; she breathed. She smelled of sweet grass and sun-warmed earth and a pungency that was horse.
She came and laid her head in Sparrow’s arms, and coaxed her to rub the spots that itched: along the cheeks, under the jaw, down the neck to the big square shoulders.
She sighed. Sparrow sighed. They rested against one another.
The moon crept up the sky. The horses grazed or drowsed or stood guard against the raiders of the steppe.
After a while Sparrow curled in a nest of grass at the white mare’s feet. She slept there, more deeply than she ever did in her father’s tent. And in her sleep she dreamed, but it was only the dream of the white mare.
She had lived it that night. What it meant beyond itself, she did not know, nor did she care.
oOo
She woke in the dawn, shivering, damp with dew. The moon had set. The mare stood above her like a white hill, head low, hipshot, asleep. Her mane was knotted and her tail tangled with burrs. She had never looked more mortal.
Sparrow knew then what the dream meant. Here in living flesh, breathing the air that mortals breathed, was one of the gods.
A goddess. Horse Goddess. She had taken the form and semblance of one of her children.
There was great power in the knowing, but no fear. Not here in the grey light of morning. Sparrow was safe, warded and protected. No ill thing could come upon her here, and nothing touch her, unless the mare willed it.
Sparrow sat up. The mare snorted gently, but otherwise did not interrupt her sleep. Sparrow reached to touch the sturdy leg that stood closest. It was dark still to the knee, though dappled with silver. And it was quite solid.
Gods, the priests said, were things of air and naked power. They lived in the wind and the storm, and rode the sun. Sometimes they spoke through chosen vessels. Often they took on the fur and flesh of an animal, or flew as a bird, bearing messages from Skyfather to his lesser creation.
But to be born in flesh, to live in it, to be both mortal and god—that, Sparrow had never heard of. It was a new thing, a great thing. It was a mystery.
Was this the vision that Walker hungered for?
Her lips stretched in a mirthless smile. No; this was nothing that Walker would think to ask for. When Walker demanded visions, he had in mind those that furthered his cause and fed his power. She had no doubt at all that he could use this as he used everything.
She was not going to give it to him. This was hers. The mare had been born at her feet, had grown in her presence. The truth had come to her, not to the Walker Between the Worlds. Let him find his own vision. This one she kept for herself.
She rose stiffly. The mare woke with a small start, shook herself, rubbed her face on her knee. Then she turned her head and looked at Sparrow.
It was a command, as clear as if she had spoken it in words. Get on my back. Mount and ride.
Sparrow almost laughed. It was just as the Grandmother had said of that long-ago and older mare. Just such a command, just such an irresistible compulsion to obey. There was the mare, there was her broad pale back; and she was standing conveniently close to a low jut of stone.
Sparrow hesitated. When the Grandmother had done it, it was nothing that anyone had ever done before. Now it was a thing that only men did.
That had been so since the prince took both vision and power away from his sister and made it his own. Boys learned to ride on gentle and much-scorned geldings. Men earned the right to master stallions.
Women did not ride. They were forbidden the herds; forbidden to defile them with female impurity.
Indeed; and Sparrow had defied that prohibition since she was a child just barely big enough to slip away from her nurses and hide among the horses. Mares had raised her rather more attentively than her father’s women had.
But she had never tried to ride. She had never been asked.
Sparrow gathered her courage in both hands. She clambered up on the rock. The mare stood still beside it. Gingerly, trying not to breathe too hard, she laid a leg across the mare’s back. The mare flicked an ear at it, but did not buck or bolt as Sparrow had seen the colts do. With a sudden, almost fierce movement, Sparrow pulled herself astride.
The mare staggered a little, finding her balance. Sparrow clutched mane. The mare steadied. Sparrow clung to her, unable to move and barely able to think.
What had Linden said once in her hearing? “The world is a different place from the back of a horse.”
Yes. It was. She had sat higher above the world, on the summit of a hill, in the branch of a tree that grew near one of their winter camps. And yet, to sit on the back of a living creature, to feel its warmth, how it breathed, the way it shifted to carry her weight: she had never known a thing like it.
She leaned forward a little, meaning to stroke the mare’s neck. The mare adva
nced a step, as if surprised; then found herself walking.
Sparrow had to remind herself to breathe. That was what the men said when they taught the boys to ride. “Breathe. Don’t clench. Let the horse carry you.”
She tried to do that. It was harder than it had looked from a hiding place in the grass. A horse’s back was round, and it rolled. At the same time it surged forward, then back. It was too much to do all at once.
It’s worse if you think about it. Wolfcub’s voice, clear as if he stood beside her. You have to just do it.
And that was the hardest thing. Not to think. Simply to do.
The mare circled the herd, walking more steadily as she grew accustomed to carrying Sparrow—and no credit to Sparrow, either; for all that she could do, she still clutched and clung. And yet she clutched less, the longer the mare walked.
The sun came up as Sparrow sat on the back of the mare. She was facing east, as it happened. The clear light fell full on her face, bathed her and the horse she rode.
It blessed her. She was sure of that, as sure as she had been of anything, even to the mare’s divinity. The sun smiled on her, and on what she did. She had pleased the gods.
3
White Bird labored long and hard to deliver the child that was, she insisted, another son for her husband. It was a long enough labor that most of the women in the tribe had out of courtesy to find occasion to visit the birthing-lodge.
Keen would have avoided it if she could. White Bird was as arrogant as she was beautiful, and she had been insufferable since she began to bear children to Drinks-the-Wind. She always seemed to take particular care to remark on Keen—how they were of the same age, and Keen had yet to bear a child at all, whereas White Bird was bearing her third; the others having been daughters, and never counted except when White Bird wanted to vaunt herself over Keen.
That White Bird had caught Drinks-the-Wind’s fancy when her breasts were barely budded, and Keen’s father had waited till her courses came before he found her a husband, mattered little to White Bird. She only cared that she be better than anyone else, and especially Keen.
“It’s because you’re more beautiful than she is,” Sparrow liked to observe. “She’s jealous.”
Keen did not think she was more beautiful than White Bird, but that White Bird was jealous, she could well believe. White Bird was jealous of anyone who had anything that she wanted, or might expect to want. And Keen had seen how she looked at Walker.
Walker was young, strong, beautiful. Drinks-the-Wind was strong but he was old, and his teeth were bad. He smelled like an old man. Not like Walker, who was fastidious, and even bathed in winter.
Keen took her time in paying her respects to White Bird in the birthing-lodge, though it might cost her in courtesy: if she waited too long, White Bird would bear the child, and Keen would be known to have stayed away. That was not a wise thing for the wife of a shaman to do to the wife of a greater shaman.
On the second day therefore, which was as late as she dared, Keen gathered her courage and her store of calm, and went to the birthing-lodge.
Drinks-the-Wind’s women had built it by the river in a place sacred to the women’s gods, shaping it of woven reeds and making it soft inside with heaped grasses. Herbs were strewn among the grasses and hung at the entrance to the lodge. The fire that burned in front of it was pungent. Its smoke curled toward the blue vault of heaven. The gods would find it sweet, and the earth would cherish it; and ill spirits would fly far away.
Some of the women sat outside the lodge. They had been telling tales of horror, birthings that went on for days, women rent asunder, children stillborn or ill-born or cursed by the spirits. These were the tales they always told; and they were always driven out of the lodge, sometimes sooner, sometimes later.
Those who stayed within were wiser, maybe, and better able to hold their tongues. White Bird sat on the birthing-stool, swollen, sweat-streaming, exhausted. Her hair was lank about her face. Her body was gone all shapeless, great mass of belly, milk-heavy breasts, thighs parted as she strained to bear this child.
Warriors came back from battle less worn than this woman was, and her battle was not yet over. Keen almost admired her. When the pains struck, she did not scream. She grunted, that was all, and set herself to endure.
They were coming close together. It would not be long now. Old Mallard squatted down in the midwife’s place and thrust a hand between White Bird’s legs. The other elders leaned close. Mallard nodded. “It’s coming.”
Keen, spared the necessity of speaking polite words to White Bird, found herself catching the infant as it came. She was close, she was quick, and it came so fast that it caught even wise old Mallard by surprise.
They all stared at the wet and wriggling thing in Keen’s hands. It gasped and choked and let out a thin wail.
“Yes,” White Bird said faintly. Then more strongly: “Yes. Let me see him!”
The women glanced at one another. Keen, still holding the child, knew a moment’s satisfaction as she laid the child in its mother’s arms.
White Bird was so sure it was a son, that for a long moment she did not see what all the rest of them had seen. When she did, she stared. Her face went slack. So too her arms.
Once more Keen caught the child—the daughter whom White Bird had not allowed herself to foresee. It was a strong child, well formed, and large for one so young: small wonder then that it had taken so long in coming.
Keen tried to give the child back to its mother. But White Bird turned away. “That’s not my baby,” she said. “I have a son. Where is my son?”
Keen stood holding the child. No words came to her.
It was Mallard who said, “There, young one. There. Lie down now, and rest.”
“Give me my son,” White Bird said. “Where is my son?”
“Rest,” Mallard said. “Rest.”
Keen carried this youngest of the shaman’s daughters into the light. Female that she was, she had no name, no existence till her father granted her both; and if he did not, then she belonged to the wolves and the birds of the air. What her mother wanted did not matter.
The women by the fire, seeing the girlchild in Keen’s arms, sighed and rolled their eyes. White Bird was not greatly beloved. “Pity,” one said for them all.
It was only a girl, but there was still somewhat they could do for her: wash her and lay her in the swaddling that had been waiting. It was a fine swaddling, of the best doeskin, ornamented with quills and beads, a swaddling for a prince. They left it open for the father to see, and because, if he chose not to grant her life, she must be laid naked on the plain for the wolves to take.
Keen had caught this child as she fell into the world. It was her place, by the gods’ will if not her own, to serve as messenger to the shaman. The next time, she thought, she would be the first to visit White Bird in the birthing-lodge, and the first to leave, even before the fire was lit and the herbs scattered on it to drive the demons away.
But on this day she carried her small squalling burden from the sacred place into the camp. None of the men would be caught staring at a baby. The children, who had no need to be so proud, ran after her for a while, but babies were dull. And Keen was taking this one to the old men’s circle, dullest of all the circles, and least inclined to welcome a pack of children.
Drinks-the-Wind was not like a young father awaiting a first son, so eager or so desperate that he either paced the camp till the people in it were ready to cast him out, or else snatched weapons and horse and fled till he could bear to come back again. Drinks-the-Wind was an elder, a shaman, father of many children. He might not even be aware that one of his wives had gone to the birthing-lodge—men of such stature as his could take little notice of such things.
Somehow Keen did not think White Bird would have allowed her husband to forget what she was doing. She would have made sure that he knew, and that he waited for the son she meant, herself, to place in his arms—for she had declared in everyone�
��s hearing that she would do just that.
Keen’s coming therefore would tell him all that he needed to know. That made her even less willing than she might have been, to do what had been laid on her. But she was a proper daughter of the People. She did not walk away from duty.
The elders sat in the circle as they did every morning and every noon, and every evening, too, as often as not. It was always the best place in the camp, wherever that camp might be. Here, it was a low hill that looked out toward the river. The king’s tent was pitched there, beside a gnarled and ancient tree that was sacred to the spirits of earth and air. The white horsetail of the People hung from it, swaying gently in a bit of breeze.
The old men sat in the tree’s shade, heads for the most part as white as the horsetail, backs more often bent than straight, and faces seamed with the passing of years. The king was one of the youngest: he still sat erect, and his shoulders were broad, his yellow hair not yet gone all grey. He still rode, still hunted, still led the People in battle as a king must do. When he could no longer do any of that, he would no longer be king.
Drinks-the-Wind was older—how much older, Keen could not be certain. Not as old as the Grandmother had been, who had died before she married Walker, but old. Old enough to be ancient. Yet he sat straight and bore his strong old bones lightly. The plaits of hair that lay on his shoulders and flowed down to his waist were white, but thick and beautiful as a woman’s. He had been as handsome as his son when he was younger, it was said. He still had great beauty, the beauty of a tree in winter, stark and strong under the weight of snow.
His magic was strong, the power of his name terrible. Tribes far away from the People knew and feared him. Sometimes they sent their own shamans to seek his wisdom, as, Keen saw, some tribe she did not know had done just now: there were strangers in the circle, men smaller and darker and thicker-set than the People, bearing the spirit-bags and bone rattles of their calling. They did not speak the language of the People, but communed in signs that traders and travelers passed from tribe to tribe across the steppe.