by Judith Tarr
He could not make it matter. She was in his arms, willingly, consciously, as he had always prayed she might be. He would hold her for as long as she would allow it, for the memory; so that when she went back to being herself again, he would have this to feed his dreams.
39
Sparrow had never intended to do what she did. To keep him in this country, yes; to bind him here where he would be safe, at least until the People came to take back their king of stallions. But to do it this way . . . no, she had not meant or expected that she would do such a thing.
He was grown so splendid. When she saw him standing among the Grey Horse People, so much taller than any of them, and so light and proud in carriage, her heart had thudded wildly and then settled to a distressing flutter. She had had all she could do to say what she must say, to be as properly dignified as she should be before the king and the people.
It was worse for that, at sight of him, she had known exactly why he was here. She had seen it in him, in images like the embroidery of her coat: the command that bound him, the long hunt, the storms, the lion, all the tests the goddess had forced him to endure. She had seen the woman Rain, too, doing with him what a woman does with a man.
She had seen much too much. Rather sooner than was strictly polite, she had escaped the king and the people and gone looking for him. When she found him sitting all alone and knotted in misery, her heart had run on without her, had spoken for her, acted for her, brought her into this embrace.
She did not yearn for him as she had yearned—in a way still yearned—for Linden. He was more beautiful than Linden, because his beauty was less perfect. His face was long and rather austere, not a face made for lightness or laughter. His body was lean and panther-lithe and strong, with a way about it that made her breath catch. The way he moved, his light smooth stride, the way his head turned just so, that steady gaze of his from under lowered eyelids—she had known them since they were children, but she had never truly seen them.
She could not help it. She had to touch; to hold him fast. He was a little repelled, a little horrified. She could see it in his face. And yet she could not stop herself.
This must be what drove women to lie with men. Sparrow had thought she wanted to lie with Linden, but when she came to the point of imagining it, she could not. She could easily imagine lying with this man. Oh, easily indeed.
This man. Her friend, her better-than-brother. This king’s companion who had been set on her trail like a hunting hound, whom honor and duty bound to capture her and carry her back to her death.
That was a torment in him. She, foolish heart, held him all the closer for knowing that, and tried to kiss the pain away. But that was not wise—no, not wise at all.
Men, so incited, could be as fierce as stallions. That, everyone knew. What Sparrow had not known—what she had never expected—was that a woman could be fiercer.
She should stop. She must stop. He was not struggling, which surprised her. He must be frozen with shock.
Until she met his eyes, and saw what made her cry out. “You, too. You, too!”
They tumbled from the stone onto grass all sere and dry with winter, where the sun had melted such snow as the wind had not scoured away. It was surprisingly soft and surprisingly warm. Not that Sparrow cared—the fire in her was enough to warm a world.
He stared at her, struck dumb perhaps by the sight of a woman naked in the winter sunlight. Then he touched her as she stooped above him, tracing the spiral that Old Woman had drawn round about her breast.
She gasped. His touch woke—something. Not desire only. It was as if, under his hand, the power grew stronger. And as he traced each intricate and interwoven swirl, it gained in strength, till she was like to burst with it.
She would burst, unless she did the last thing, the thing that all this had led to. But she could not do it—she would not—if he was not willing. If he did not understand.
She stopped his hand as it came to rest above the thicket of her sex, where the spirals came to their completion. She held it there, cool against the fire of her body. “Do you love me?” she asked him.
He regarded her in—despair? “With all my heart,” he said.
Her own heart leaped. “Is that truth? Do you swear it?”
“By Earth Mother’s womb,” he said, “it is the truth.”
And then he said, “Do you love me?”
And she understood. As clear as his vision was, this he could not see. He could not pierce the defenses she had raised about her heart.
He thought she hesitated. His despair deepened. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Whatever you can give—”
She silenced him with her finger on his lips. “Don’t say that. Don’t think it! How can you doubt that I love you?”
“As a sister,” he said. “As a friend.”
“Surely,” she said. “And more.”
“Not more,” he said. “Don’t lie to me. I’m glad of what I can have.”
“I am not,” she snapped, “if that’s all you think I’m capable of giving you.”
There: her temper startled him out of his silliness. Not altogether, maybe, but enough that he began to believe her.
The joy that woke in him then, however tentative, however uncertain that it dared exist, so brightened his beauty that she blinked, dazzled. Austere, had she been thinking? Stern, and little given to laughter? Not this man who lay in the winter grass. He was as light as air, and as golden-bright as the sun.
She took him so, as a man might take a woman: with both passion and gentleness. She was braced for the pain. What she had not expected—what she had not been prepared for—was the sheer white pleasure.
She almost fled the shock of it. But he held her fast. He took her as, just now, she had taken him. He was strong, and skilled enough that she widened her eyes. He seemed, now it was much too late to escape, to have given himself up to it; to have let the joy overcome all his misgivings.
No wonder they called it a dance. When it was danced so, as equal and equal, it was like the dance of warriors about the royal fire: bound and yet apart, vying in strength and skill, but matched, so that neither could be victor, and neither be vanquished. They hung poised on the piercing edge of pleasure, until, with a swift, sure stroke, he lifted them up and ever up.
She had thought she knew. She had imagined. But to know. . .
And to know all of it. What she was. What he was. What they had done, they two, in a place of power, under the eyes of mare and stallion.
Old Woman had not told her. Old Woman had never told her anything that she was to learn for herself. It was not only the learning in the heart, the signs drawn on the body, the sacrifice made and consumed as the goddess required, that made the shaman; that completed the rite. It was this.
She laughed as she lay exhausted, with him a heavy, limp weight in her arms. She could feel him slipping free of her, shrinking and softening. Her laughter roused him, and offended him more than a little—he half-pulled away, relieving her at least of his weight. But she held him before he could escape entirely.
“Was I that bad?” he demanded.
That only made her laugh the harder, and made him all the more ridiculously offended. It was a long while before she could master her voice enough to say, “Stop that! I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at me.”
He did not believe her: he glowered through a tangle of loosened hair. She smoothed it out of his face. “You men,” she said. “Everything is always to do with you. Can’t you imagine for a moment that I might be laughing because I am a raging fool?”
“Why? For this?” There was a growl in it, but he was listening.
“For thinking that, without this, I knew everything there was to know.”
“Why, didn’t you?”
She slapped him lightly, but without anger. Then she kissed him, because she could not help herself. That might have led to other things, but he was only a man; he could not go on and on as a woman could.
She forgave him. She was dizzy, as she had been when she first rode the mare: as if all her life had been leading to this, and she had never known it or begun to imagine it.
He was coming out of his sullenness, a little. And more, as she traced his body in kisses, until, all unwillingly, he began to laugh. Then it was well. It was very well indeed.
40
They lived in the camp of the Grey Horse that winter, at the king’s urging and by Old Woman’s own wish. Sparrow had inherited Old Woman’s belongings, her goats, and her shelter, too, though that lay empty through the winter. She was rather surprised on taking stock, to discover that by the measure of the Grey Horse People she was a woman of substance.
She owned a tent of respectable size, she discovered on exploring the shelter, and a remarkable number of comforts to fill it, even such treasures as a nest of clay bowls and a lidded pot painted with spirals like those limned on her skin. There were baskets of fine weaving, stores of herbs and potions, cured hides and furs, knives of flint and hardened bone and, folded well away, that strange black stone which took so deadly an edge.
There was a great store of beads and shells, some strung into necklaces and armlets, most laid away in small baskets or scraps of hide. She even found things that she had no names for: odd gleaming stones, sun-colored or moon-colored, strangely heavy and cold in the hand. Sun’s tears and moon’s tears, she reckoned those; and the small dark stone, heavy and potent, that made her arm ache to hold it, must be the heart of the night.
Those she put away as she had found them, wrapped tight and hidden in a basket of more ordinary stones. What they were, what powers they had, she did not know; but someday perhaps she would.
She traded a pair of she-goats, each with twin kids, for an ox to carry it all back to the Grey Horse camp. The ox was well laden. She had wealth to share, hides and furs enough to give away, and ample herbs and simples for the work of healer and shaman. She would not be a useless burden on these people, any more than Kestrel would with his hunter’s skills, and Keen with her needle and her gift for calming fretful children.
Sparrow had never dreamed that she would be either rich or a shaman. And here she was both.
At first she fretted. With her presence, this small and none too powerful tribe boasted three shamans. North of the river, that would have been as difficult as asking a herd to accept three stallions, or three queen mares.
But Storm said when she murmured of retreating to Old Woman’s camp, “My spirit is not so weak that it needs to fear a rival. Only grant that in matters pertaining to the tribe, my word rules yours. In all other things, you may rule me if you choose. Or we will consult, and settle matters between us.”
Sparrow could agree to that. But there was still Rain to consider. Rain was younger and famously headstrong, and it was clear that she had been enjoying Kestrel’s attentions before Sparrow came to displace her.
She kept well apart, was not among the curious and the welcoming when Sparrow raised her tent on the camp’s eastern edge, and did not share the daymeal with her mother and her brother and the guests. First she had gone off hunting, then she had disappeared with a man well known for his prowess with the women.
oOo
But after the long mild spell ended and the cold and storms of winter closed in once more, Rain could not wander so far afield. Sparrow ran her to ground one chill grey morning, found her in her mother’s tent drinking warm goat’s milk and playing a game of bones with Cloud. Keen was there, and one or two children; she was teaching them to string beads on a hair from a horse’s tail and embroider them on a scrap of doeskin.
Sparrow sat on her heels to watch the game of bones. Rain played like a man, with a fierce edge of temper. Cloud was calmer, wiser. He had won a handsome handful of shells and beads, and was proceeding to win another.
He was doing it for Keen, Sparrow thought. When he cast a good hand, he glanced at her. She seemed oblivious to him, but when he was not looking at her, she darted her own brief glances.
Sparrow wondered if they even knew what they were doing, or how strong the bond between them had become. It was like a rope of braided hide. She could see it if she shifted her eyes, see how it grew stronger the less notice they seemed to take of one another.
But she had not come to watch those two grow together in spirit while their bodies remained decorously and perpetually apart. She turned her attention on Rain.
Rain was a shaman. There was no mistaking it. She had the gift. But she was lacking in discipline. She was not calm and focused within herself as Storm was, or as Sparrow had learned to be. She tried to shift the cast of the bones to favor her cause, but she only succeeded in casting the figure called the Oxtail, which lost to every figure but itself. He in response cast War, and so won the round.
When the bones came back to her, she flung them down in a temper, leaped up and stalked out of the tent. Sparrow rose quietly and followed her.
oOo
She did not run away as Sparrow had half thought she might. Sparrow caught her near the tent in which, Sparrow recalled, her lover of the season lived with his mother and sisters.
“He’s not there,” Sparrow said. “He went riding with some of his cousins. They were going to meet a hunting party from—was it the Boar?”
“Yes,” Rain said more politely than Sparrow might have expected. “I left my bow here. I’m going to find them.”
That was true, Sparrow supposed. “They went east, toward the beech-wood.”
Rain stopped in front of the tent and turned to face her. “I suppose you just know that.”
“Don’t you?” Sparrow asked, not trying to be provoking, but not forbearing from it, either.
“I’m not the shaman you are,” Rain said. “Nor will I be. Old Woman told me that. I’m strong, and I’ll do well for my people. But you were made for this whole country.”
“Does that trouble you?”
Rain frowned. She did not seem troubled. Thoughtful, yes. Jealous? A little, maybe.
“I think,” she said, “that you’ll have greater glory, but I’ll have much greater peace of mind. I used to dream of being the one—I won’t deny it. But now I know I’m not, I’m rather glad.”
“Then you’re going to be able to endure my being here?”
“I’m glad you’re not living in my mother’s tent,” Rain said. “As for your being in the camp, no, that doesn’t matter to me. There’s room for both of us.”
“Is there?”
“Why, are you going to challenge me?” Rain shook her head. “You’re not that foolish.”
“Maybe. But you might challenge me.”
“What for? To see myself beaten soundly and put in my place? I think not. Although,” Rain said with a flash of dark eyes, “if you’re speaking of the Sparrowhawk, that’s a different thing.”
Sparrow eyed Rain’s belly, which was visibly rounded with the baby, and eyed the tent, in which she spent rather riotous nights with the handsome Horn.
Rain tossed her head. “What, you’ve never heard of two men sharing a woman? But you wouldn’t, would you? North of the river, women share a man, but never the opposite.”
“Maybe Horn would consent to that,” Sparrow said, “but I doubt that Kestrel will.”
“And if he would, would you let him?”
“He can go where he pleases,” Sparrow said. “He’s not my prisoner.”
“So generous,” sighed Rain. She sobered suddenly however, looked Sparrow in the eyes and said, “I won’t squeal and kick at you like a rival mare. I’m content with what I am here, and with what I have. Maybe I want that lovely man—but if I do, I’ll win him fairly. That much I promise you.”
Sparrow decided to accept it. It was not what she had been looking for, but it would do.
oOo
It was a long winter, and hard. The Grey Horse People did not suffer too badly. Only three children died, and two of them had been sickly in the autumn. None of the elders died; no one starved, th
ough by the first thaw of spring, the hunting was as thin as the hunters.
Sparrow did not care at all for cold or hunger. She had all the warmth she needed, and all the sustenance. Kestrel kept his tent and she kept hers, but neither slept alone. Sometimes they slept in her tent, sometimes in his.
The first time, the night after they first came together, it was Sparrow who went to him, creeping out in the firelit dark and the frosty stars, and slipping into his tent, and finding him awake.
She did not speak. His arms were as eager as hers, his body as urgent. This time there was no pain when he entered her, no hindrance; she was open and ready, as a woman is, taking him deep and holding him. Without pain, the pleasure was even greater—so much so that she cried out in astonishment, then buried her face in his shoulder, mortified.
He laughed at that, stroked her and held her until she would lift her head again. “Now everyone will know what a great bull of the plains I am,” he said.
He did not blush when he said it, either. Something had opened inside of him, some gate of the heart that had been locked shut. In coming to him as she had, she had done much better than she knew. She had made him happy. She had made him hers.
oOo
They were lovely, those long icy nights, wrapped in each other’s arms, whispering of anything and everything, laughing as often as they spoke, and taking one another with fierce delight. He loved to trace the shaman-signs drawn in her skin, to feel the tingle of power as it woke and grew strong. She let free a little of it to soothe the terrible deep scars in his side and back, the marks of the lion’s claws.
He lost himself in the thick dark curls of her hair. She freed his ruddy mane from its plaits, smoothing it and combing it till it hung waist-long, then binding it up again, as only a lover could do.
She was beautiful to him. He was beautiful, but she who to most eyes was rather ordinary, in his sight was as splendid as Keen. “You shine,” he said to her, “like sun on clear water.”
“That’s the magic,” she said. And, in wonder: “You can see it?”