Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  A shape grew out of air beside her. The mare was a white light in this grey place, a splendor of divinity amid the flittings of lesser spirits. Her light put the shadows to flight. As she had the first time Sparrow rode her, she bade Sparrow ride on her back, and carried her swifter than Sparrow could ever go alone.

  Sparrow clung to the shining white mane and slitted her eyes against the bite of wind. On the mare’s back she had her own shape and substance, and her own strength, too, which was greater than she might have imagined.

  She needed it for that ride along the thread of Keen’s life. It went far, very far, on and on till without the mare’s presence Sparrow herself might have begun to diminish and fade into a shadow.

  Then at last near the heart of that plain she found what she looked for: the shadow of a shadow, a dim and flickering thing that even as she cast her eyes on it, began to fade. The mare’s light gave it a little more substance, but not enough. Sparrow swooped upon it, and caught it. It was like catching at a spider’s web, so fragile and so easily broken. And yet somehow she closed her fingers about it. She drew it up.

  As it came, as it touched the shimmer of the mare’s light, it deepened into a greater solidity. The thing in her hand was an arm, and a body dangling from it, too thin, too pale, and all but lifeless, but it wore Keen’s face. Sparrow held to it, letting it fall face-first over the mare’s withers. The mare stood fast under it. She wheeled in a long curve and sped back the way she had come.

  oOo

  Wolfcub did not know how long he held Sparrow’s hands. It was not so very long: the geese were still roasting, the water simmering, steeping the green astringent herbs. Sparrow gasped, quivered, gripped his hands so tight he set his lips against the pain. Just as suddenly, she broke free, half-falling, stooping over Keen.

  Keen had not roused. But her breast rose and fell strongly. Her cheeks were no longer quite so pale. She looked alive as she had not before: as if she slept, not as if she slid into a long slow death.

  “She’ll live,” Sparrow said. Her voice had a flat sound to it, as if she had emptied herself of all emotion.

  “But will she wake?” Wolfcub asked—foolishly perhaps, but he had to know.

  Sparrow nodded, though the movement almost felled her. “I need to sleep,” she said. “Feed her some of the broth with goose-fat stirred in it. Wake me when the sun goes down.”

  She did not wait for Wolfcub to answer. She dropped down beside Keen. When he touched her, she did not stir. She was deep asleep, deeper even than Keen.

  He sighed faintly. He had a great deal to ponder, but he was not ready yet to do that. Sparrow and the mare. Sparrow doing such a thing as shamans did—and with ease and grace and swiftness that he had not seen even in the great ones. He had eyes to see, and a spirit that perceived more than some. He had followed her a little way. He had seen where she went and how she went there.

  If a woman could not be a shaman, then gods knew what Sparrow was. Something greater than a shaman, maybe. Just as a woman could not ride a horse—and this mare carried Sparrow willingly. This mare who was, his heart knew, more than simple earthly creature. Much more.

  It was all too much to take in. He settled for meddling with their dinner, drawing off the fat as Sparrow bade him and stirring it into the broth of herbs, and feeding it sip by tiny sip to Keen. At first she took it passively, but all at once she seemed to wake; she struggled, tossing her head, spitting out the mouthful of broth that he had dribbled into her.

  She was alive, awake, open-eyed and glaring. A glare from gentle Keen bemused him perhaps beyond wisdom. He could only stare at it till she came to herself a little, looked about and softened slowly. “Where—what—”

  Her voice was rusty, but to his ears incalculably sweet. “We’ll catch the People tomorrow, I expect. Here, eat a little meat. You need to find your strength again.”

  Keen looked as if she would have argued, but women learned early to heed a man’s voice—and Wolfcub’s had deepened gratifyingly in the past season. She gave way to it with little of her usual grace, let him feed her a mouthful, then two, before she turned her face away.

  He did not press her. She had eaten enough for one who had been fasting. The sleep that took her then was good sleep, strong sleep, sleep that healed.

  She would live, as Sparrow had said. He thought she might even gain back the heart and spirit that burned so low in her still.

  16

  Keen came back to the People on foot, walking arm in arm with Sparrow. The mare was nowhere that any of them need see. Wolfcub had been prevailed upon with difficulty to hunt elsewhere and return later.

  Sparrow might not have insisted on that, but Keen had roused from her long black dream to the conviction that it were best he not be seen with the two women. Even if he walked—she would not hear of it.

  She doubted that he understood. Sparrow did, perhaps: she let the two of them settle it while she bade farewell to the white mare. The mare was not happy, either. Her ears were flat and her tail flicked restlessly. But she went as Wolfcub did, because she was not given a choice.

  The People were camped two days’ march from the plain of gathering, in a place where they had camped for time out of mind. The priests and shamans had already begun to prepare for the rites which they would oversee. The young men practiced with weapons and in the dance. The elders held council.

  The two women slipped into this camp with all its bustle and confusion, and dared to hope that if they had been missed, it would have mattered little to anyone where they were gone.

  That indeed seemed true for Sparrow. As soon as she appeared near Drinks-the-Wind’s tent, one of the wives was shrilling at her, bidding her do something or other, and not so much as a greeting or a by-your-leave.

  Keen escaped under cover of Sparrow’s preoccupation. She was not as strong as she wanted Sparrow and Wolfcub to think, but she had the strength to find her tent and belongings in a heap with the rest of the baggage. She set up the tent in its usual place in the camp, alone, though people paused to stare, and one or two tried to offer a hand. But she wanted none.

  At this time of day Walker was always out and about with the men or sitting in the elders’ circle. She was free, then, to rest; and in a little while she would go out, and see what there was to eat. By sunset, when Walker was likely to come in search of her, everything would be as it had been since they were married.

  She spent a little time imagining what she would say to him, and what he would reply. She hoped he would not be angry; surely he would have worried, though he had trusted others to go looking for her.

  Walker did not come back that night, nor did she see him in the morning. When they broke camp, she packed up the tent and its belongings as always and loaded it all on the back of the dun ox that her father’s wives had given her at her wedding. She was weak still: she had to pause more than once to breathe.

  The second time she did that, the bundle she was lifting flew out of her hands. Wolfcub flung the rest of them onto the ox’s back, bound them with skill that left her staring, and walked away before she could muster a word.

  Of course he would do that. A man who lowered himself to such a task, and for another man’s wife, trod the thin edge of propriety. His silence let people pretend they had not seen it. His departure freed them of any need to disapprove.

  Keen found that her eyes had pricked with tears. She blinked them away quickly. She was being a fool, as she had been since she let herself be lost on the plain. She had to be strong, to be herself again.

  On the march she often took her place near her father’s wives and some of her sisters, but today she found it simplest to fall in behind Aurochs the hunter’s women and youngest children. Aurochs was out hunting again as he nearly always was. His senior wife, who happened to be Wolfcub’s mother, walked alongside Keen, leading her own ox and carrying on an easy and altogether undemanding conversation. Hunting, of course. Men in general. The best way to cook the neck of a deer, with
which some of the other wives took issue. Gossip here and there, of things that Keen had cared about once and would again, maybe, but she was still too frail in spirit.

  Something in Willow’s expression, some tilt of the glance, told Keen that this was not happenstance. Wolfcub had asked his mother to look after her. Keen’s resentment was sharp as she understood that, but she lacked the strength to be contentious. After a while she could even smile a little, thinking of that young man and his meddling. Wolfcub was like that, after all. Not like Sparrow, who was inclined to let things be, or else to rush in headlong and cause a great deal more trouble than if she had kept away.

  Friendship, thought Keen. Her eyes were pricking again. She gripped the ox’s lead tighter and trudged on steadily, the women’s gait from the dawn time, one foot in front of the other, pace after pace, measuring the broad earth in the length of her stride.

  oOo

  The People were among the first to come to the plain of the gathering. Only a handful of tribes were there already: Red Deer, Dun Cow, Cliff Lion that was nigh as great as the White Stone tribe, and would have been glad to be greater. White Stone, as the largest tribe, the king-tribe, had the best camping place, the long rise above the great river, with a lesser river flowing along the foot of it to merge with the greater one beyond. They had clean water unsullied, and the best grazing for their herds. From the hilltop they could look down on the rest of the tribes as they came in one by one, and at night see the campfires spread along the river like a field of stars.

  Their camp guarded the great circle on the hill’s summit with its stone of sacrifice, and lay closest to the field where the dancers gathered. They were the guardians of the sacred places. Their priests were highest in rank, their shamans known to be strongest and most skilled in magic.

  Of course there was envy. And it was a ninth year. Everyone spoke of it. The sacrifice, which in lesser years was but threefold, Hound and Bull and Stallion, this year would be ninefold. And some of the tribes that held still to the older ways would gather to choose one of their young men, an unblemished youth, a warrior and a dancer, for the great sacrifice.

  Time was when he would have been offered as king, but now even these tribes chose kings as the White Stone did, though the taming of the king of stallions. The young warrior that they chose would go as messenger for all the people of the plain, all the tribes who bowed before Skyfather and rode on the back of the horse-god, bearing their greetings and prayers to the gods beyond the sky.

  But people were whispering. Everyone knew that the king of the White Stone stallions was dead, and that a new king had risen—and the king of the White Stone People had not yet tamed him.

  “Yet,” said an elder of the Cliff Lion as Wolfcub was passing by. “What if that is never? It takes a young man to tame a stallion.”

  “Or an old one with skill and craft,” one of his companions said. “It’s a young stallion, hardly more than a colt. It shouldn’t tax the king too greatly.”

  Wolfcub’s step faltered. At that, some of the elders of the Cliff Lion had laughed, but it was a low sound, like a growl. There was danger in it.

  None of them spoke aloud what they must be thinking. If the king of the White Stone was not strong enough to keep his place, another king might think to claim it for himself.

  Wolfcub wondered if Walker had thought of that. In all his plans and scheming, he might only have considered his own tribe. But the other tribes might have somewhat to say of such a king as Linden.

  oOo

  “As the kings of the lesser herds did?”

  Sparrow was scraping hides when Wolfcub found her, kneeling on a great pale bullhide and attacking it with a scraper of hardened bone. It was a vigorous task, particularly in the heat of the day. Her face was crimson, her hair escaping its plait to cling wetly to her cheeks. Wolfcub could not at all escape noticing how the neck of her worn tunic drooped over her round breasts, or how the thin leather clung to them.

  He tore his eyes away and focused his mind on her words, which were sharp, clear, and measured in strokes of the scraper. “The king stallions all bowed to the mares’ choice. How do you know the kings of men won’t do the same?”

  “Men are men,” Wolfcub said, “and they don’t listen to women.” Her eyes flashed up at that, but she kept her temper in check. “Men listen to shamans.”

  “One young shaman, however powerful?”

  “All the shamans of the tribes, even Drinks-the-Wind, if my brother has his way.”

  “You don’t know this.”

  She bent to her scraping. The hide gleamed with her labor. It would be a fine tunic, from the quality and thinness, for her father or one of his wives.

  “You don’t know it,” Wolfcub repeated. “Do you?”

  She did not answer. She never did, if she decided that she had said enough.

  He hissed in annoyance and left her kneeling there. He had been going hunting, but now he was minded to hunt men. She had made sure of that. He could not go his own way, not until he had proved to himself that she was wrong.

  Shamans in camp kept to themselves except during festivals, when they gathered to work magic and to cast omens for the tribe. Shamans at the gathering, which was one long festival, made camp by the sacred places, and therefore in or very near the camp of the White Stone People. It always surprised Wolfcub to see how many of them there were. The People had Drinks-the-Wind and Walker Between the Worlds, and Drinks-the-Wind had a handful of apprentices. Each of the other tribes had a shaman, rarely two. Two full shamans in one tribe was a great thing, though it was only to be expected of the White Stone People. They were great in magic, everyone knew, and much blessed of the gods.

  Or so Wolfcub had been told. He wanted no magic but what aided him in the hunt, or—he could admit it—what was between man and woman. Shamans were strange creatures. All of them, as he saw them together in their circle, bore some deformity, some oddity of shape or form, that marked them as belonging to the gods: a twisted leg, an eye born blind, a blood-red stain marring the face. Only the White Stone shamans lacked that—and yet, might not their beauty be a strangeness of its own?

  Their circle was not openly forbidden, but people avoided it. There was always someone sitting in it, sometimes one or two or three, shaking a bone rattle or muttering to himself or staring at the fire. The rest came and went from the great tent that was pitched on the edge of the stone circle. Scents wafted out of it, drones of chants, a sense that raised the hackles on Wolfcub’s neck.

  He could not go in there. He would not enter the circle. There was no way to discover what Sparrow wanted him to know. He mused briefly and a little wildly on asking Walker outright: “Are you plotting to cast down the king and raise another?” But Wolfcub was never so much a fool.

  He turned his back on the shamans’ circle and let his feet lead him through the camp, past a circle of dancers and a circle of warriors and a gathering of women by the little river, who blushed and hid their faces and giggled when he went by. Women had been doing that ever since he came to the gathering. At first he had looked to see if his leggings had slipped to bare his secret parts, or if he had some mark or stain on his coat, but he was in as good order as ever. The women were being women, that was all.

  oOo

  Past the Cliff Lion and the Dun Cow, the Tall Grass People had come in just this morning and made camp in their wonted place. Tall Grass came from farther south than most, near the country of the little dark people, and many of them were smaller and darker than the run of the tribes.

  Wolfcub had a hunting-companion or two among the Tall Grass men. As he was thinking of seeking them out and hearing what they could tell of the world to the south, his eye found a very tall, very fair figure among the shorter, swarthier ones. He slowed his advance, slipping without thought into a gathering of men, glad for once that he was not as tall or as pale as some.

  They greeted him with reserve in the way of the Tall Grass, but there was warmth in it. Someone
handed him a bit of dried meat; he offered in return one of his mother’s honeycakes. That, shared out, was well received.

  All the while he observed the courtesies, he was aware of the tall man nearby, sitting with the king and a man even paler than he, white as a bone indeed, who was the Tall Grass shaman. Walker was not saying anything that Wolfcub could take exception to. But his presence there, the way he leaned toward his brother shaman, made Wolfcub uneasy.

  It was foolish. Sparrow’s fears made him see trouble where there was none. Walker was observing the courtesies, that was all, just as Wolfcub was doing; as men did all through the tribes, and women, too. That was what gathering was.

  And yet when Walker bade farewell to the king and the shaman, Wolfcub lingered only a little longer. He did not want to follow the shaman and be seen. But he took note of where Walker went. He was visiting the tribes one by one, with seeming casualness, and in each one, paying his respects to its king and its shaman.

  Drinks-the-Wind was doing no such thing. He had not been seen since the People came to the gathering. He was in the shamans’ tent, performing great rites and preparing for the sacrifices. So should Walker have done, but he chose to be out and about.

  At least he had let Linden be. Linden was doing much the same as Walker, but of him it was expected, even required. He was a king’s son of the White Stone; he should be leading the dances and the games.

  oOo

  He was also one of those who guarded the horses. Which was nothing to wonder at, but after Wolfcub left the Tall Grass camp, he wandered by the herds. And there was Linden sitting on the back of his pretty gold-and-red stallion, surrounded by an even larger pack of young hellions than usual, watching the new king court a mare.

  The mare was not particularly inclined to oblige her suitor, but he was persistent. He was not well endowed with wits, Wolfcub reckoned, but of beauty he had more than enough. He was prettier even than Linden’s stallion—and that, surely, was what so enraptured Linden.