by Judith Tarr
“Not strangers,” Old Woman said. “They know me, and know of my guests. She’ll be more than safe with them.”
Sparrow had to accept that, as Keen did, because Old Woman was firm. It was to be done just so. Neither of them was given a choice.
Therefore, in the morning, Keen rode away. The stallion carried her gladly, with understanding of his duty. Sparrow would have preferred that the mare do that, too; but the mare must stay. She was part of the rite that loomed ahead of Sparrow.
There were preparations. Sparrow made them. They did not take long enough; the day still stretched interminable. Old Woman lay like a banked fire, the life in her sinking low.
At long last the sun set. It was a mild night for winter, but with an edge of frost. The stars were high and far away. By their cold faint light, Sparrow lifted Old Woman in her arms, finding her as light as a bundle of sticks, and carried her out of the shelter.
The mare was waiting, a white glimmer in the starlight. Sparrow laid Old Woman over the white back and held her there. The mare stepped softly under that fragile weight, picking her way through the snow, climbing to the summit of the hill.
It was a low hill, but the stars had granted it some of their lofty height. The world seemed to spread beneath it, a pattern of signs and images like the embroidery of Sparrow’s coat.
She stood beside the mare on the hilltop and eased Old Woman’s limp light body down. It was alive, but the life clung to it by a thread.
She laid it gently in the snow. It was beyond cold and beyond fear. She, who was neither, still was taken somewhat out of herself. Such cold and fear as she felt were remote, and therefore bearable.
She was the mare’s chosen, Horse Goddess’ child. She was high priestess of a rite that had not been seen in the world before, a new rite, terrible and holy.
There in the dark of the moon, under the winter stars, she sang the words that came to her, words as high and cold and sweet as the stars’ own singing. She called on Horse Goddess and Earth Mother and the gods of death and rebirth. She invoked the mare, and the life that swelled within the mare. And finally, kneeling in the snow, she bowed low before the old woman, the shaman of the lost tribe, the firstmother of this new order that was made flesh in her.
She bowed in deep respect, and in admiration, too; and if not in love, then in more esteem than she had ever thought to feel for that rough-spoken, ungentle creature. For they were very like—as like as kin, whatever the truth of that might have been. They had, in their way, been as grandmother and granddaughter. What the Grandmother had begun, Old Woman had completed.
So it was done. She drew the knife that Old Woman had bidden her take, long and wicked, with a strange black blade and a haft of polished bone. Singing, wordless now, a long, high keen, she performed the sacrifice. She severed the thread that bound spirit to body.
The body lay still and cold. The spirit soared up, matching the note of her song, swelling it, till it rang in the sky.
oOo
The silence that fell thereafter was enormous, and bore still a memory of sound. In it, with steady hand, she took the heart from the still breast and the liver from the belly. She offered them up to the gods. In their name, and by Old Woman’s firm command, she ate of each: heart for knowledge, liver for spirit. They were warm and rich with blood—richer than she would ever have expected.
In blood was life. It drained out over the snow, black in starlight. She bowed low again, with the taste of blood in her mouth. Old Woman’s command had been strict. She had no choice but to follow it. As if the body had been the carcass of a deer, she gutted and flayed it, stripped flesh from bones, and made a great offering of the flesh. She set it in fire that she had prepared on the hilltop, a tall pyre of cured wood that Old Woman had set aside in a hidden place, and lit it from the hearthfire, so that it blazed up to heaven.
The bones she kept, polishing them till they were white and clean. In bright firelight she buried them in the grave that she had dug that day, laying them with care as if they had been the bones of a king. She covered them with the hide of a white mare, a mighty thing and holy: first of the white mares that had been in the world, foaled when Old Woman was young, in the grim spring after her people were destroyed.
She had been Old Woman’s hope and her salvation. She had died at a great age, in the herd of her children and grandchildren, all of them greys as she was, sires and dams of greys, a whole royal race from whom Sparrow’s own mare had sprung.
Now her hide covered Old Woman’s bones. They needed no other shroud, and no greater treasure.
But the globe of the skull, Sparrow did not bury. When she had raised the cairn over Old Woman’s bones, that remnant lay waiting, unburned and unburied. Grey dawn shone on it. The fire had died to embers and ash.
Sparrow bowed to the corpse of the fire, and deeper to the cairn in which lay the bones, but deepest of all to the skull, the clean white bone still faintly tinged with the rose sheen of blood. She took it up in her hands, turned and carried it down from the hill, as the sun rose full in her eyes.
oOo
She made a cup of the skull, as men did with the heads of their enemies. Three days she labored over it. She scoured and polished it. She inlaid it with stones as Old Woman had instructed her, such stones as she had not seen before, blue as the summer sky. With the black knife she carved a winding spiral pattern, the same as that which wove round about her breasts and belly, and colored it with soot from the bonfire and with red ocher that was almost as bright as blood.
All the while she did this, Old Woman’s spirit watched, hovering above her, offering acid commentary. It was no more gentle than it had been in life, and no more complimentary, either. And yet, perhaps because it was freed of the flesh, it could not deceive Sparrow as it had done before. She could sense its approval, however grudging and however well hidden. Old Woman was pleased, though she loathed to admit it.
On the third day the cup was complete, or as much so as Sparrow could make it. It was a beautiful thing, a terrible beauty, like the rite that had made it. When she lifted it in her hands, she could feel the power pooling in it. Sunlight poured into it like water, filling it, brimming over.
She carried the cup to the stream that ran through Old Woman’s camp. The water was icy cold and very swift. It filled the cup quickly, mingling with the sunlight. Sparrow, kneeling by the bank, lifted it up to sun and sky—and yes, to Old Woman’s spirit that hovered still—then lowered it to her lips and drank.
It was like drinking winter, pure and cold, and yet sun’s warmth was woven in it. It turned her blood to ice and then to fire. It pooled in her belly. There in her center, the rite was complete: heart and liver, blood and bone.
With a sigh that seemed half exasperation, Old Woman’s spirit took wing at last, arrowing into the sun. Yet it left a part of itself behind, as a bird might: a feather of living light. It drifted gently down into the cup, and there rested, melting and flowing, until it had vanished into the cleansed and polished surface.
The cup was alive in her hands. She could feel the warmth in it, the presence that would not leave it now, not till the cup itself was broken and its fragments ground to powder.
Which will happen, said a voice in her mind, a voice very like Old Woman’s, when you die yourself, and your successor makes of your skull a new cup.
That would not be soon, if she survived the war that was coming. She set the thought aside, and the cup, too, wrapping it in soft doeskin and concealing it among the belongings in the shelter. Old Woman’s shelter—hers now, if she chose to stay.
Or she could go. She was free. She was, by every rite, a shaman.
“I still don’t know that I am one,” she said.
Somewhere perhaps, Old Woman ground her few teeth in frustration. But Sparrow could not lie to herself, or to Old Woman either.
The power that was in her, that she had drunk from the cup, still needed something to be whole. Time, maybe. Wisdom. Patience. Patience above
all, one of the many virtues which Sparrow signally lacked.
37
Keen rode into the camp of the Grey Horse People on the back of a black-and-silver stallion who had been a king once and perhaps would be a king again. There were people waiting for her: Storm, Rain, and Cloud standing behind them. At sight of him, entirely without her willing it, her heart leaped.
They welcomed her warmly, handed the stallion to eager children for tending, took her to Storm’s tent and fed her and made much of her. For all her worry and her grief, her fear for Sparrow and her sorrow that Old Woman was dying and she could not be there, she felt as if she had come home.
It was a strange feeling, because it was so unexpected. These were not her people. They looked nothing like her. She did not speak their language, though they were pleased enough to speak the trader- tongue that they had in common.
And yet they were honestly glad to see her, and clearly happy to be entrusted with the care of her. She had never been so welcome among her own kin. The People reserved such effusions for sons, never for daughters.
She tried, guiltily, not to be content, or to be comfortable. Sparrow would be neither, keeping the deathwatch over Old Woman, and then doing what must be done thereafter.
Exactly what that was, she did not know. She did not want to know. But it could not be anything easy or pleasant. Great magic never was. She was—had been—a shaman’s wife. She knew.
But it was warm here, in the heart as in the body. No one asked where Old Woman was. They knew. They grieved for her; she had been a great shaman of this country, much admired and even loved. But it was her time. If she did not go, she would defy the gods; and that would be a great ill thing.
Keen had no duties here. Tomorrow she would ask to be given somewhat to do. Today she was content to rest, and to stitch at the swaddling she was making for the baby. The camp’s life went on around her, preparing for the rite that would greet the sunset: the ritual and sacrifice of the dark of the year.
It was not as great as among her people—this was a poor tribe, and focused too on sun and earth, so that the rites of spring and fall and the brief night of midsummer were greater to them than this. But they had their priests and their procession, their fire built high against the dark, and their sacrifice, a black goat offered to the spirits of night and the world below.
Or so Cloud told her, sitting by her in the long and wonderfully mild afternoon. “Aren’t you a priest?” she asked him. “Shouldn’t you be preparing?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “This is a women’s rite. I offer the Bull at midsummer, and dance with Earth Mother’s daughter in the spring. Autumn is for the old men, and winter for the women who are elders, and for my mother, who is king and shaman.”
“And your clan-sister?”
He nodded. “I’m not needed at all, nor am I wanted. Time was when as male and heir both, I would have been kept in my tent, lest my presence bring ill luck to the rite.”
“Truly?” Keen asked, surprised. “That’s how it is for women among the People, for all the great sacrifices.”
“All of them?”
“We weaken them, you see. Because our spirits are so feeble.”
He snorted like a startled horse. “That is outrageous! And you believe it?”
“It’s the gods’ command.”
“Not our gods.” He shook his head. “Women are strong. To bear and give birth to a child—there’s no battle more terrible, and no courage greater. To call you weak . . . what, are your men blind?”
“We are weak,” Keen said. “We can’t fight as well, run as fast. We’re not brave, or strong in battle.”
He did a terribly improper thing: he laid his finger on her lips. It was warm and very light. “Hush,” he said as if to a child. “Don’t say such things. Don’t believe them.”
“They are true.”
“Not here,” he said.
She sat still. He had reclaimed his hand, to her deep and altogether unwilling regret.
She would not touch him in turn. She refused. Though her fingers yearned to discover if his beard was as crisp as it looked, or if it was soft. Though her body would have loved to lean toward him, to rest in his warmth.
She had never felt such things for a man before. Walker had aroused her, had made her eager for his touch. But she had never wanted so simply to be near him, to be there because he was there. Walker came to take her as a man takes a woman, and she had submitted gladly to the taking.
She wanted to take this man. To be bold as a man was. To go to him and take him in her arms and love him. Even with the child between—the child that her husband had set in her.
It was terrible, this wanting. It tormented her. It made her loins ache, and set the child to stirring restlessly, protesting the tightness in her middle.
She was both glad and sorry when a child came with a message from Cloud’s mother, bidding him go on some errand that had to do with the sacrifice. He seemed to regret the need to go; but he could hardly disobey his king.
The child who had fetched him lingered, perhaps on the king’s orders. It was a girlchild, very bold in her expression, with a pair of smaller, male shadows. She amused herself for a while in watching Keen stitch at her baby-clothes. But soon, bored, she wandered off, followed by one of the boys. The other lingered, hanging back as if he worked up the courage to do something.
All at once, and quickly, he did it: he touched the long bright plait that hung over her shoulder. He horrified himself with his bravery. In the light of her smile, like a startled rabbit, he ducked and spun and fled.
She was still smiling when the currents of the camp, which had been more or less aimless, gathered and focused. She thought, as she watched, that perhaps the rite had begun, though it was well before sunset.
But it was nothing of the sort. It was an arrival in camp, a hunting-party coming back with wherewithal for the night’s feast. Keen did not need to go out to see what they had brought: they came toward the king’s tent, bearing two nobly antlered stags and a young bear. It was a splendid hunt, she could see, and a great omen for the rite.
The hunters laughed and sang, and some danced, beating on drums and shaking rattles. It was an oddly bright music for the dark of the year, but fitting in its way. It suited the pale sunlight and the almost-warmth of the day, and helped a little to hold back the dark.
The center of the dance, the lord of hunters, came last into her sight as she sat by the tentflap. She had been expecting some great black-bearded bear of a man. But the one who strode long-legged among the shorter, darker, thicker tribesmen and—yes—women, was as lean as a yearling wolf. His hair was ruddy brown, his beard sparse, nothing like the thick black beards of even the young men.
He was so familiar that at first she did not know him at all. He belonged in another world, that had nothing to do with this one.
And yet even her shock could not long evade the truth. Her lips moved, shaping his name. Wolfcub.
He had not seen her. He was in the sunlight, she in the tent’s dimness. People crowded about him, as she remembered they had been doing among the People: solitary Wolfcub, as he grew into a man, had become a man whom people yearned to follow.
He was more comfortable with it here than he had been in that other place. He was older, too, and thin as a sharpened blade. Pain had etched his face, so that if she had not known how young he was, she might have thought him a man full grown.
People were calling to him, and he was answering. They did not call him Wolfcub. They called him something—Kestrel?
Yes, they had named him after the sparrowhawk. Her heart paused a beat at that, and knew a small, cold stab of something like fear.
It did not have to mean anything. And yet, what was he doing here? How had he come here, and why, if he was not hunting Sparrow and the silvermaned stallion?
He must be alone. She had seen no others of the People anywhere.
Then maybe he had come because he could not bear to be parted f
rom Sparrow. Sparrow did not know, or even guess, what she was to this man; but he loved her with all his heart.
Keen had always known it. She had been jealous of it when she was younger, because Wolfcub loved her, but not as he loved Sparrow. She was his dear friend and his heart’s sister. Sparrow was his heart and soul.
Yes, that was why he was here. Keen was sure of it. He was a great tracker. He had followed Sparrow, but had elected not to show himself to her. Probably he was wise. Sparrow would be very angry if she knew that he had left Linden, and his honor among the People, to run in her wake.
But it was utterly like him. Wolfcub was so named because he went where he would, and often alone.
Keen sat quietly in the king’s tent. He was coming toward it, or trying to; people kept stopping him. They wanted to talk to him, smile at him, touch him. She saw how he was about it: a little uncomfortable, and not greatly inclined to seek it, but gracious enough if there was no escaping it. He would, she thought, have made a rather presentable king. Kings were solitary, too, after all; set apart from their people.
He would have been appalled to hear her say that. She smiled at the thought.
It was her smile that he must have seen first as he stooped to come into the tent. For an instant she wondered if she had indeed said what she was thinking: for he regarded her in pure horror. But she had not said a word.
When she did speak, it was warmly, in some hope of reassuring him. “Wolfcub,” she said. “Oh, I’m glad to see you well!”
“Keen,” he said with no warmth at all. But that he knew her name, he might have been a stranger. “How did you come here?”
“I was sent,” she said—biting her tongue on the first answer that came to her: I rode. A woman did not, must not ride. Not if she would remain among the People.
“And—the other?”
“You don’t know?”
He went stark white. “She’s dead.” She thought his knees might buckle, he looked so suddenly feeble; but though he swayed, he stayed on his feet.
“Not dead,” Keen hastened to assure him. “No, she’s very much alive. But—”