Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  He shivered as a man must when he faces a god, or a god’s messenger. But he was not willing to give up the name his father had given him. Not though it was a child’s name, and he was a man. He had kept it when he took his manhood, because no other name was given him, nor did one come to him.

  Because he had waited for this?

  “See,” said the woman named Rain. “You are Kestrel. There is the face of your spirit. Isn’t it a handsome one? Be swift, as he is. Be fair. Be made new in this world.”

  He shivered again. When he tried to think of himself as Wolfcub, his mind blurred. But he was not Kestrel yet. He was no one.

  Strong hands took his. They were not the woman’s, which somewhat surprised him. The man said, “There. It’s a lot for your strength. Sleep now, and grow strong. When you wake, you’ll truly be made new.”

  “Or dead,” he said—Wolfcub, Kestrel, whoever he was.

  “Not dead,” the man said firmly. In his way he was as forthright as the woman, and as determined that the world should go as he wished it. “Now sleep.”

  oOo

  Kestrel slept—not like the dead; he was alive, and by Earth Mother would stay so. Cloud glared at Rain. “And no thanks to you, either,” he said. “What did you do that for? Couldn’t you see he was too weak to carry a new name?”

  “He’s stronger than you think,” Rain said, unrepentant. “Isn’t he beautiful? Those eyes—they’re marvelous. And so,” she added wickedly, “is a certain other part of him.”

  Cloud was not about to deny that. But he said, “You embarrassed him horribly.”

  “Didn’t I? He’s such a modest creature—who’d have thought it? He makes me think of the Long River boys: so shy and yet so sweet. They’re wonderfully bold in the inner tent, once you get them there. I wonder . . . ?”

  “That,” said Cloud, “you’ll not be finding out tonight, or for a fair number of nights after. He’s a long road still to ride before he’s strong again.”

  “I’ll help him,” Rain said.

  “Not that way.”

  “Not,” said Rain, “until he’s ready. No.”

  Cloud eyed her in mistrust, but she was all limpid sincerity. There was little he could do but sigh and hope she meant it.

  oOo

  The man who had been Wolfcub, who was now named Kestrel, slept and woke and slept again, a blur of waking and dream. When he was awake, people fed him and made him drink—water sometimes, but more often mixtures of strange tastes, pungent and sweet, bitter and salt. The man was often there; Kestrel learned that his name was Cloud. The woman, Rain, who declared herself to be a shaman, came and went. Sometimes there were others, small dark people like the rest. None of those would speak to him; they averted eyes and did whatever was necessary and left.

  They were keeping him drugged, he understood early on, but he lacked the will to fight it. It was to help him heal, Cloud said. Cloud was the healer, and also a prince of the tribe—not its king, but king-heir.

  The king never came. A woman did, one very like Rain, but not her mother; Rain addressed her as “Aunt.” She was Cloud’s mother, and she was a woman of great presence and clear strength.

  Like Rain she had no modesty as women of the tribes knew it; sometimes she wore a tunic as a woman should, but equally often she appeared in leggings or in a kilt of fine white leather embroidered with swirling signs. There were like signs circling her breasts and her ample belly, like—king-marks?

  She was the king. She was also the shaman of the tribe, and Rain was her apprentice. Cloud was her heir.

  It was most strange. Women and men walked freely together here. There seemed to be nothing that either did not do. He saw women coming in from the hunt, and men tending children—though none made shift to nurse an infant.

  Sparrow would love these people. Women rode horses, too, sturdy grey horses with remarkable grace in movement, such horses as Kestrel had seen in the royal herd of his own people. But none of those greys was Sparrow’s mare, nor was there any sign of her, any suggestion at all that these people knew of her.

  Why he should think there might be, he could not imagine. He had long since lost her trail. He was not even sure where he was, except that he was south of the river—far south of it, if he could trust his memory. Sometimes he thought he truly had died and was gone among the gods—and such gods, too, these dark lively people who seemed to laugh as easily as they spoke.

  oOo

  They were mortal enough. Someone died while he lay mending, a very old man, who seemed to have been much revered. That night one of the half-grown boys stayed with him, sullenly, while everyone else took the body and wrapped it in a horsehide and carried it away. Whatever rite they practiced, however they entrusted their dead to the gods, he was not to see. The next day they came back, walking quietly, and returned to the business of living.

  As indeed should he. Their potions were growing weaker as he grew stronger. The day came when he happened to be left alone for a few moments in a changing of the guard. He had been measuring a tentpole for some days, judging its strength.

  It was strong enough for him to pull himself up. He was barely strong enough to do that, or to stand gasping and with his sight growing dark, till he had to let go or pull the tent down with him.

  When he could see again, he looked up at Cloud, who stood as tall as a hill above him. “Good,” Cloud said. “You did it yourself. I was pondering ways to force you.”

  Kestrel blinked. He was stupid with exhaustion, but Cloud pulled him up. He already knew how strong that short broad man was; stronger by far than Kestrel. Nor would he let Kestrel rest till he had walked, on his feet though leaning on Cloud’s wide shoulders, back to his too-familiar bed.

  After that Kestrel was to get up whenever he could, and if he lay too long, Cloud or Rain or even the king would come to drag him up and make him walk. First around the tent, then to the fire and back, and thereafter by greater distances until he had circled the whole camp and begun to explore the fields and woods about it.

  oOo

  Summer had passed while he lay healing. Autumn had come: warm red-golden days, crisp chill nights. As soon as he was up and walking, he was given garments to wear, made to his measure for he was taller and narrower than people here: leggings, tunic, and his lionskin cleaned and much more adeptly tanned than he had managed to do on the hunt. It was a beautiful thing now, supple and tawny-gold. He had his necklace back, too, and his armlets that he had taken from the boar.

  He did not fancy himself overmuch, though he was well and properly clothed. He had lost flesh terribly in his sickness. His side and back were deeply scarred. Cloud gave him an ointment to soften the scars and keep him from stiffening on that side.

  He would have been gladder of that if Rain had not been so eager to help him. He had come to understand that she was, if not Cloud’s wife, then his woman. They slept in the king’s tent, close to the wall of the one in which Kestrel lay, and there was no mistaking what they did together.

  And yet she was terribly free of herself with Kestrel. That she ran about half-naked seemed to be common and accepted for women of these people, but none of the others made herself so evident to Kestrel as this one did. If she was feeding him or pouring a potion for him, she always found a way to brush his arm with her breast, or to stand so close that he could not move without touching her.

  She loved to touch him: combing and plaiting his hair while he was still too weak to do it, brushing his cheek with her fingers, resting her hand on his shoulder or his arm. More than once she slid her hand down his arm till her fingers were wound with his, easily, as a child will, but those eyes were no child’s.

  The ointment was a difficulty. He could salve his ribs well enough, but his back was hard to reach, between tightness and old pain. If Cloud was about, Kestrel could ask him to help, but Cloud never seemed to be nearby when Kestrel needed him. Rain, on the other hand, never seemed to be elsewhere. She loved to find him struggling with the sweetl
y pungent stuff, snatch it from his hand and work it into his back and sides with skilled fingers.

  They were very skilled, and adept at working strongly but without pain. But they tended to stray. They wandered up along his shoulders, which was not so bad; but they also wandered down and round until, if he was not deeply wary, they had found his rod. It of course by then was defiantly erect. It did not care that she was another man’s woman.

  But his spirit did, and his good sense. He always found a way to shift away from her, to elude her hand; but one day when the apples were full ripe in the wood near the hill, she would not let him escape. When he turned to remonstrate, she had rid herself of her leggings, and knelt boldly naked. His movement, by his accident and her design, brought him up against her body.

  She laughed, rich and warm, and gripped him tight before he could recoil. His rod was trapped between them, escaped from its leggings—her doing, too. Deftly and utterly wickedly, she mounted him where he knelt.

  His heart thudded in horror. But his rod was wild with delight. She was hot inside, hot and sweet, clasping him like a wonderful strong hand. She knew very well what to do and how to do it. She bore him back and down, driving him deep inside her, with a gasp and a shudder of pure animal pleasure.

  He could only be glad, with the last fading glimmer of sense, that they had long since lowered the walls of this tent which they had given him. He was not forced to couple in full view of the camp. But anyone who passed by could hear—for he was grimly mute, but she was making no secret of it at all.

  All the while his mind babbled in terror, his body took everything she gave and returned it joyfully. He had no power to resist her. She was a shaman. Whatever she wished for, she had.

  She did not take him and use him and abandon him as a man might a woman. When she had brought him to a roar of release, she held him inside her for as long as his slackening member would stay there, then sat astride him still, rocking gently, regarding him with enormous contentment. “You,” she said, “are a beautiful man. You don’t really know that, do you? So many men do. But you don’t believe it.”

  He was in no condition to banter with her, or indeed to speak at all. She did not seem to mind. She brushed her breasts across his breast, sliding down the length of him. “Smooth,” she said. “Like a boy. Except here.” She had it in her hand again, but gently, as if it were a bird lifted from the nest. “And here.” Her fingers raked his beard, lightly, combing it smooth. “Are all of you so lightly furred?”

  That, too, he could not answer. He was wondering when Cloud would come, and how the prince-heir would kill him. Cloud seemed a mild-mannered man, but Kestrel had seen him come back from a hunt with the hide and meat of a bear. Cloud was as strong as that bear, and deadly skilled with bow and spear.

  While he lay speechless, Rain explored his body. She was like a child with a new toy, searching out all its secrets. She found the mark on his shoulder like a tiny splayed hand. She kissed that—irresistibly, she said. She loved the freckling on his arms and legs and across his shoulders, and over his nose, too: sun-kisses, she called them. She measured his limp hands against hers, marveling at how narrow they were, and yet so long, and strong enough when he was not frozen with fear of what her man would do to him.

  When she took his hand and laid it over her breast, then at last he found his voice, if not his strength. “No,” he said.

  She widened her eyes.

  “No. I can’t do that. Your husband—”

  “I don’t have a husband,” said Rain.

  “Your man, then. Your—”

  “My man? Can one person own another?”

  “Cloud,” Kestrel said in desperation. “Whatever he is. The man you lie with at night. What will he do when he finds us? Geld me? Kill me?”

  She stared in flat astonishment. “Why in the world would he want to do that?”

  “Because you belong to him. Because—”

  “I do not belong to him. He does not belong to me.” She paused. Her eyes narrowed. Her head tilted. “Are you telling me that one of you would kill another for lying with a woman?”

  “For lying with someone else’s woman. It’s great dishonor.”

  She shook her head, amazed. “What savages you all must be! And do women kill women for the same cause?”

  “Of course not,” said Kestrel. “A man may have several women. They share him.”

  “But men don’t share a woman?”

  “Only,” said Kestrel, “if it’s a king’s woman, and the king offers her as a gift. But Cloud, who will be king, has not—”

  “You give women? As gifts?”

  Now he was astonished. Her light mood had vanished. Her eyes were blazing. She pulled away from him, recoiling as if he had said something that made her terribly angry. She snatched up her leggings where she had cast them, but did not even trouble to put them on before she had stalked out of the tent.

  oOo

  Kestrel was still lying there when Cloud slipped through the half-open flap. He scrambled up, seeking about wildly for something, anything, that might serve as a weapon. But there was nothing in reach, nor anything that he could come to before Cloud stood in front of him.

  The prince-heir did not seem angry. He was, as far as Kestrel could tell, amused. “Gods,” he said, “what a temper you’ve thrown my clan-sister into! I haven’t seen her so angry in days.”

  Kestrel’s teeth clenched. Some men smiled before they killed. If this was one—

  “What did you say to her?” Cloud asked with every appearance of honest curiosity.

  Kestrel answered truthfully, because he was mad perhaps, or because he did not care if he lived or died. “I told her that kings among my people give women as gifts.”

  “Do they?”

  “Don’t they do that here?”

  Cloud shook his head. He was not angry, but he was not delighted, either. “I suppose you said something of her being that gift.”

  “Not—exactly,” Kestrel said.

  “Ai,” said Cloud, half amused, half dismayed. “No wonder she was in a rage. We don’t give or trade people here, plainsman. Only cattle and food, and things made by hands.”

  “But women—”

  “Women are the living incarnation of Earth Mother, as men are of Skyfather. Do you give away the earth under your feet? Do you value it so little?”

  Kestrel had long since begun to see where Sparrow got her strange notions and odd sense of fairness in the world. “But why is Rain so angry?” he asked, since Cloud did not seem immediately ready to kill him.

  “She chose you to lie with her,” Cloud said. “She reckoned you worthy. Some women will lie with any man, but a shaman chooses only the best and the most beautiful. Her magic depends on it. And you let her know you think of her as chattel—a thing to be traded, like a heifer or a shell necklace.”

  Kestrel’s mouth was open. He shut it. “You knew—she—”

  “She’s been talking about it since she first laid eyes on you. She wanted to do it days ago, but I wouldn’t let her. You needed to be stronger first.”

  “But she is—your—”

  “She is my clan-sister. We can make a child together, but we can’t marry. When she takes a husband, she’ll take one from another clan. She was thinking of taking you, but I don’t think that’s wise. You’re too different. And,” said that astonishing man, “I think your heart beats for another woman than Rain.”

  Kestrel could think of nothing at all to say. He was in a world unlike any he had known—except for the glimpses Sparrow had shown him. To say his heart beat for her . . .

  “I hunt that woman,” he said in a flat, hard voice. “When I find her I am bound to kill her. As for your shaman—I am sorry I offended her. I never meant to. Will you tell her that for me?”

  “I can try,” Cloud said. He crouched down by Kestrel’s side and inspected the scars, calmly, as if it was no matter at all that they had lain with the same woman.

  Kestrel lo
oked him in the eyes. “Aren’t you even slightly jealous?”

  Cloud stared back, dark eyes quiet. “I suppose I could be. I’m good enough to look at, but you are beautiful. All the women want you. But when they’ve had their fill of you, they’ll come back to me, because you may be splendid and foreign and therefore alluring, but I will be king.”

  “What if one of them doesn’t come back? What if that one is Rain?”

  “I would be sorry for that,” Cloud said. “But even if she never lay with me again, we’d always be bound: she as shaman, I as king. Nothing will ever change that.”

  Kestrel lowered his eyes. Cloud’s quiet voice, his serene mind, put Kestrel to shame. Such a hunter he was, who could not keep his own temper in check.

  “There now,” said Cloud, in the same tone he used with the children. “You come from far away, where people are different. Understanding is hard. You’ll learn.”

  “And if I don’t want to?”

  “Then you don’t.” Cloud rose. “Come out into the sunlight. You’ve been too long in the dark.”

  That was true. Kestrel staggered up, stiff, gasping as he stretched the scars over his ribs. He was still astonished that this man knew what he had done and seemed not to care in the slightest; still faintly convinced that he would be killed for it. But Cloud treated him exactly as before, with quiet courtesy and a warmth that, if he let it, could be friendship.

  It did not matter what Cloud said. Kestrel would never understand these people.

  32

  Sparrow took to calling the shaman Old Woman, since she offered no name of her own. “That will do well enough,” she said when Sparrow first called her that, in defiance and in some expectation of a rebuke. But Old Woman seemed pleased.

  She made no effort to hold the women prisoner, or to compel them to stay. She simply expected them to do it. She was a shaman. She knew what Sparrow had to admit: that her wisdom was beyond price, and Sparrow was hungry for it.

  She did not seem to teach anything. She set the women to cleaning the shelter, sweeping out old rubbish and molding grass mats and flea-infested furs. Then they were to weave new mats, and tan the pelts that were stretched on racks of lath and sinew, and make new furs to sleep in. They were also to make themselves coats out of deerhide tanned most finely; and no matter that Sparrow did not expect to be there when the snow came. “You’ll need it,” Old Woman said of the coat that Sparrow had begun sullenly to piece together.