Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  “My name is Cloud,” he said. “Old Woman calls you Keen-Wind-in-the-Grasses. Yes? That’s a lovely name.”

  “I thank you,” she said, more faintly even than before.

  There was a silence. It was terribly uncomfortable. Keen wished she could leave, but he sat between her and the tentflap. She would have to climb over him to escape.

  Then he said, “It must be terribly dull to sit here listening to gossip of people you’ve never met. Would you like to see the camp?”

  Keen started to shake her head, to decline, but Old Woman said heartily, “Yes! You go, child. Cloud will bring you back when it’s time.”

  They were all smiling and nodding, as if it were nothing improper at all for a man to play host to a woman not his wife. Cloud had risen and drawn her to her feet before she could say a word, holding her cold hand in his warm strong one, and leading her out like a child.

  When they were in the sun, Keen slipped her hand from his, as politely as she could. He did not seem offended. In a cloud of curious children, they walked through the camp.

  oOo

  It was a small tribe, and not rich, but it had enough to eat this season. No one was sick. The animals were in good flesh, the young ones lively, and there were a good number of them, cattle and goats and horses. Even the camp dogs were not remarkably ribby, and more than a few of them seemed to have places beside fires or near tents.

  It was a warm place, Keen thought, like the man who led her through it. He was the king’s heir; not that he said so, but the way people spoke to him, and the air he had of pride in these people and concern for their welfare, told her clearly what he was. They paused more than once to meet this person or that: a woman weaving grass mats, a man making a pot of rolled clay. They were all gravely courteous.

  None seemed surprised to see her, though her bright hair made them stare. Keen might not have dared to ask, but Cloud was a comfortable companion—almost too much so. Before she had thought, she said, “Everybody seems to know who I am.”

  Cloud smiled. She rebuked her heart for leaping when he did that; he had a wonderful smile, that lit his whole face and sank deep in his eyes. “We all know about Old Woman’s guests. Everyone is delighted to meet you finally. It’s been a struggle to keep the children from running off and doing it themselves.”

  “I would wager,” Keen said, “that some of them have been spying on us for days.”

  “A few of them have,” he admitted. “So you knew?”

  She shook her head. “It’s what I would be tempted to do.”

  He laughed. It was infectious: Keen found herself smiling. He blinked as if dazzled. “You should smile more often,” he said.

  She bit her lips and looked away.

  “There,” he said in quick regret. “I’ve insulted you.”

  She should have kept quiet and found a way to escape, but he was so contrite and so troubled that she said, “You haven’t insulted me. It’s only—I don’t know how to talk to a man. We don’t learn, you see. I had a friend, he was like a brother, but when I grew up and married, we weren’t supposed to be friends any longer.”

  “That is sad,” Cloud said.

  “It is the way it is.”

  “Not here.” He slanted a glance at her. “How horrified would you be if I told you that you are beautiful?”

  She must have been blushing scarlet: her cheeks were afire. “A man never tells a woman such a thing! Unless—”

  “Unless?” he asked when she did not go on.

  “Unless he has . . . intentions.”

  “Wicked ones? Kindly ones?”

  “Wanton ones.”

  “Well,” he said, “I do. But only if you share them.”

  “Oh!” It was a gasp, trying hard not to be laughter. She was not supposed to laugh at such terribly wicked words. And yet the way he said them, the brightness of his eyes under the strong black brows, the smile just revealing itself through his handsome curly beard, made her want to do and say things that were absolutely improper.

  And she a married woman with a child in her belly. Men were not supposed to see such things, but he would have to be blind not to mark the shape of her. Did it not matter to him?

  He was certainly aware of his own attractions. Those were considerable. He walked like a stallion, light and proud, and with the same conviction that the world was made for his pleasure. And, even more, that he was made for women’s pleasure.

  She had not met a man like him before. Among the People, men were either properly restrained or given to falling on women without regard for honor or civility. A man who looked on a woman with frank desire, but did not leap on her immediately thereafter, was unheard of. And for him to say as much—outrageous.

  Worse, she did not turn her back on him and stalk away. She stayed, there on the edge of that alien camp, and let him admire her. She knew she was beautiful, she had always been told so. Her hair was yellow, her eyes deep blue; her face was pleasing to men’s eyes.

  These eyes were more direct than any that had ever rested on her, even her husband’s. Walker had looked at her often, but never entirely seemed to see her. She was a face to him, a form, a pair of eyes. This man saw beneath them. His warmth touched her heart.

  “You will always be welcome here,” he said in that soft deep voice. “Remember.”

  “Honorably welcome? And not only because you want me in your bed?”

  That was breathtakingly bold and awesomely rude, and it seemed to come from someone else altogether; but that was her voice speaking. He only smiled. “In all honor,” he said, “though if you were to invite me to your bed, I would never refuse.”

  35

  Kestrel knew he was healed when he went out to hunt the morning after Rain lay with him, and the hunt kept him out through the night and into the next day; and when he came back, he had been gone three days and the people of the Grey Horse were beginning to fret. But he had a fine buck to show for it, and a pack of doeskin laden with dried meat of the doe, enough to feed the whole of the king’s family for a fair few days.

  “We thought you’d gone away completely,” Rain said.

  She accosted him soon after he came back, as he had both expected and dreaded. He had devoted the days to his hunt, but in the nights he had reflected long on her, and on Cloud who was her lover but not her husband, and on the ways of men and women among these strange people.

  Yes, he had thought of walking on and on till there was no hope of returning to the Grey Horse. But he owed them something for the saving of his life. And he owed Rain—something. Or she owed him. He went back and faced her unflinching, even though she might be angry.

  She did not seem to be that. She was glad, oh yes, and she had fretted: there was a hint of strain about her eyes. It eased as she looked at him. In front of anyone who could see, there by her mother’s tent, she stood high and high, on very tiptoe, and drew his head down and kissed him.

  It was quick, no more than a brush of lips, but it shook him almost to his knees. “Next time,” she said, “don’t walk away like that. Tell someone where you’ve gone.”

  “The king knew,” he said. “I saw her when I went out. She gave me her blessing.”

  That took Rain aback. Kestrel’s pleasure in her startlement was not altogether praiseworthy, but it was rare enough, and striking enough, that he did not care.

  “She never told me!” she said in considerable pique.

  “Should she have?”

  “Oh!” she said. “You’re as bad as she is.”

  He grinned. “I thank you,” he said.

  She hissed at him, wheeled and stalked away.

  Kestrel sighed when she was gone, suddenly as weak in the knees as if he had just risen from his bed. He was glad to seek the refuge of his tent, and find no woman there, but clean furs waiting, and bread and goat-cheese and a skin of kumiss.

  He ate well and drank sparingly, contemplated the furs, decided to rest but not sleep. He was not tired. The hunt had been g
ood, the air clean. He was himself again, no weakness left; or none that mattered. It would be a while before his side stretched as it should, or the stitch of pain left his ribs.

  He was well enough. He stripped out of the clothes he had worn since he left, wrapped himself in his lionskin, and set to taking his hair out of its plaits and combing it. It was simple labor, empty of thought, close to sleep but not yet over the edge of it.

  In the middle of it he gained an audience. Children here were given to going wherever they pleased. Their elders did little to quell them. They could even wander into great rites and high holy things, if they were quiet and did not interrupt with questions. Nor did it matter if they were male or female; they were all treated alike.

  These were three who were given to following him about. The eldest was a girl, and of the royal clan, though whether she was Rain’s sister or Storm’s daughter, Kestrel had not yet determined. The other two were boys, much shyer and quieter than the girl, and overwhelmingly in awe of the stranger from far away.

  Time was when he would have undertaken to drive them out, but that, he had learned, only brought them creeping back as soon as he relaxed his guard. He sighed therefore and endured, and went on with what he was doing.

  After a while the girl said, “Will you teach us to hunt?”

  Kestrel blinked. Not because the question was startling; because, as tired as he was, it had taken him back to another place and another tribe. A young and solitary Wolfcub was stalking shadows through the tall grass, hunting them down and killing them with the bow his father had given him. He was not very good at it, at all, but he was inordinately proud of such skill as he had.

  Until a clear voice said, “You couldn’t hit the side of a hill if it stopped and waited for you.”

  He whipped about. He had never heard that voice before, but he recognized the owner of it: the shaman’s dark-eyed daughter, the one whose mother had been a captive from a long way away. She did not play with the other children. Wolfcub had thought it might be because she was different, but maybe it was for the same reason he kept mostly to himself: he simply preferred his own company.

  He faced her as a man was supposed to face a woman, standing tall and glaring down at her. He did rather well, he thought, until she laughed at him. That made him forget dignity and snap, “I suppose you know how to shoot a bow.”

  “Not a bit,” she said. “You could teach me. Then when I’m better than you, I’ll show you how to do it.”

  The logic of that was perfectly preposterous. Even if it had made sense, Wolfcub resorted to the fundamental truth. “You won’t ever be better than me. You’re a girl.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Everything!”

  She snorted. “Show me how to shoot. Then I’ll show you.” Because she was so stubborn, and so determined that she was right, he did teach her.

  And she did surpass him. Worse: another child wandered into one of their lessons, picked up the bow while they were squabbling over the fletching of an arrow, fitted one of the disputed arrows to the string, and put it neatly through the target they had both been missing by a notable distance. That was Keen, escaped from her doting mother, drawn by the sound of their voices to discover that she had a better eye and a greater gift for the bow than either of them. In the end she taught them both, though without seeming to understand what she was doing. She simply knew: how to stand, how to nock, how to release.

  Wolfcub, grown into the man called Kestrel, wondered if any of these children would prove as gifted as Keen had been. Likely not. But he would not refuse to teach them, either.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Today I’m tired. I need to rest.”

  “You can sleep,” the girl said. “We’ll watch.”

  “You could go away,” he suggested, “and come back in the morning.”

  “We’d rather stay here,” she said. “Do you want us to be quiet? We’ll be quiet. Or we could sing. Skimmer loves to sing. Don’t you, Skimmer?”

  The shyer of the boys ducked his head and mumbled into his tunic. The girl understood him, apparently. She glowered at him. “Of course he won’t laugh! Sing him the song your mother taught you, the one about the trees.”

  Kestrel sighed and resigned himself to being entertained. He could lie down for that, at least, and be comfortable.

  The child did have a lovely voice, such as some boys had before they grew into men: clear, true, and piercingly sweet. The song was in the language of the tribe, which he was learning, a little, but not enough to understand more than that it was about a hunter in a wood. There was a lion, or maybe a bear, and nightfall, and sleep; but beyond that, he could not tell. Maybe the hunter sang the bear to sleep, then slept himself.

  Kestrel was not quite ready to follow, though he closed his eyes and let himself drift. The song ended. The children conversed quietly in the way of children here.

  Some of it he caught. Tomorrow’s hunt, and what they would learn. The venison they would eat for dinner tonight—and maybe tomorrow night, too, if they became mighty hunters. Visitors who had come while Kestrel was away, very important people, a shaman or great worker of magic and, it seemed, the shaman’s apprentice.

  They were much enthralled with that one. He was too close to sleep then to listen harder, or to wonder why. It was nothing that mattered to him.

  36

  Winter came somewhat more gently here than it did north of the river. The rolling green country and the thickets of trees broke the wind, and the rain was a little softer. But when the cold and the snow came, they came fast and hard.

  They bound Sparrow to Old Woman’s camp, where all had been made ready for them. There was ample food stored in the shelter, fodder for the horses and goats until they could go out again to forage, and the shelter itself was made larger with Keen’s and Sparrow’s labor, till it held the three of them in comfort, and the horses, too.

  Old Woman at first seemed much as she always had. But as the cold went on and the snow deepened with storm after storm, even to Sparrow’s less than loving eye it seemed that she was not as strong as she had been. She slept longer, rose later, spoke less.

  So too did Keen, but Keen was swelling with the child; in her it was strength. In Old Woman it was a clear fading.

  Sparrow had seen it before. The old could die at any time of the year, but winter was most bitter for them. The Grandmother had died in winter, in much the same way, though it seemed she had gone much more slowly. Old Woman was like a dry stick in the fire, flaring swiftly into ash.

  She did not slow or stop her odd oblique teaching for that. The brief storm-ridden days and long cold nights were made for turning the spirit inward.

  Sparrow traveled far within, and far without as well, riding the winds of the world. Sometimes Old Woman flew near her, a presence sensed but not seen. Her spirit was growing stronger as her body weakened. Death for her would be triumphant, a soaring into light.

  She was eager for it. She had lived a long, long time; had outlived a tribe, and lived past the deaths of any who had been born the year she was born. She was ready to cast off the outworn skin and fly free.

  But she did not go. She clung to life and breath, as little as that was. Keen particularly, but Sparrow too, made her as comfortable as they could, kept her wrapped in furs, kept the fire burning well and tried to tempt her with warm herb-possets and goat’s milk laced with honey. What she would not eat, which was most of it, Sparrow forced on Keen—“For the baby,” she said when Keen resisted. Keen would obey then, though not willingly.

  oOo

  The dark of the year came upon them. That year was a Great Year: when new moon and longest night were one and the same. Even without priests to count the days and reckon the moon’s phases, Sparrow knew when it came. It was in her blood and bone, deep as the breath she drew.

  With the moon’s waning, Old Woman waned, too. Night by night she sank lower. The night before the new moon, she seemed nearly to have stopped breat
hing, but when the sun rose, she revived a little. Enough to say to Sparrow who was stirring the last of the honeycomb into the milk that she had taken from one of the she-goats a few moments before: “You, rude child. Come here.”

  Sparrow was startled enough at the sound of that voice, faint and fading as it was, to do as it bade her. Old Woman’s eyes were almost as bright as ever, seeing far too clearly through all her pretensions.

  “I never did teach you manners,” Old Woman said. “But that’s no matter now. I’ll die tonight, in the moon’s dark. Be sure you stay awake and watch me go. And when I’m gone, there is that which you must do.”

  Sparrow frowned. “Do you think I’ll fall asleep, then?”

  “You’ll be tempted. Don’t give in to it. You have to watch. And then you have to do as I tell you. Do it exactly. Do you understand?”

  “Tell me what it is,” Sparrow said.

  Old Woman told her. Sparrow listened in horror. When the dry and dying voice had gone silent, she said, “I can’t do that.”

  “You can. Because you must.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t matter, child. Not any longer. You need this. Therefore you will do it.”

  “Why do I need it?”

  “Always the questions,” Old Woman sighed. “Always ‘Why?’ Child, when it’s done, you will know.”

  “You said that of my being a shaman. When I was one, I would know. But I never have!”

  “Yes,” Old Woman said. And with that, maddeningly, she slipped back into her long dream. Nothing that Sparrow did or said could rouse her.

  oOo

  Keen wanted to stay. But Old Woman had made it clear: she was not to be part of this thing that had been laid on Sparrow. It was a mild day, for winter; the sun was almost warm. She took the stallion as Old Woman had instructed, and rode off eastward. There was a tribe camped at only a little distance, Old Woman said. The people there would welcome her and look after her.

  Sparrow did not like that any better than Keen did. “You’d entrust her to strangers?” she had demanded of Old Woman.