by Judith Tarr
“The stallion made me king,” Linden said. “He was mine before Walker touched him.”
“He was never yours,” said Sparrow. “But your spirit calls to him. You know what he is. You really are a king.”
“But I need him to—”
“Not to be king,” Sparrow said. “That is in you, and always was. But to be king in front of the tribes: yes, you need something obvious. A horsehide to sit on. A stallion to ride.”
“Then you’ll let me have him?”
“I do no letting,” Sparrow said. “That’s for Horse Goddess to decide.”
“Make her give him to me.”
“I can’t do that,” Sparrow said.
His face darkened. “You won’t.”
“Can’t.” She laid her hands on his shoulders, stroking along them, soothing him as if he had been a large and restless hound. “You have to ask her yourself.”
“Yes? Then I’m asking. I want my stallion back.”
“One asks the gods in proper wise,” she said. “At the new moon—”
“Are you going to sacrifice me?”
“Not likely,” she said in the face of his fierce wariness. “You should have your full span as king, and be given opportunity to become wise. Earth Mother loves the blood of her children, but kings’ blood is no sweeter to her than any other. She’ll be as glad of a fine young bull or a stallion.”
“She doesn’t care if it’s a king?”
Sparrow shook her head. “Men’s laws mean nothing to her. When she asks for a human life in sacrifice, she wants it wholly willing. It must go to her gladly, in its full time.”
“What if I did that?”
“Someday you will,” Sparrow said. “But not now. You’re young. Your blood is hot. You have great handfuls of life still to eat.”
His gratitude was as simple as the rest of him. “I don’t want to die,” he said. “But Walker—”
“Walker will be dealt with. And you will help to deal with him. Can you play the game a while longer? Can you pretend that I laid a spell on you, and bent you to my will?”
“Didn’t you?”
She laughed—startled again by his flash of perception. About most things, she was coming to understand, he was rather slow-witted. But people he understood. And women best of all.
She reached suddenly and pulled him toward her, and kissed him until he gasped. Then she rose and held out her hand. He took it, drawing himself up. He was smiling, rather to her surprise. “I’m sorry I never noticed you,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said. “I could watch you, you see, and you couldn’t stop me.”
“Not any more.”
“No,” she said a little sadly. “Not any more.”
54
Linden came back as he had left, riding behind Sparrow on the back of the silvermaned stallion. Sparrow dismounted on the camp’s edge and walked calmly to her tent. Linden rode on as if in a dream, till he came to the warband’s camp and the herd of stallions beyond. There he left the stallion.
No one could mistake the meaning of that. Linden, in what way no one knew—but there was ample speculation—had won back his silvermaned king.
He insisted that he had not. “He’s not mine,” he said. “I was allowed to borrow him, that was all. I have to earn him back.”
“How will you do that?” Walker demanded. He had come out at Linden’s return, composed as if he had never lost his temper so strikingly in front of the warband.
Linden shrugged at the question. “Horse Goddess will tell me,” he said.
“Through whom will she tell you?”
“She’ll tell me,” said Linden. “Here, I’m thirsty. Who’s got a skin of kumiss?”
Kestrel did not have one, but he was the first to find one. Linden smiled as he brought it. “You,” he said, “should go to her.”
Kestrel flushed. “Go? To her?”
“Yes, go,” said Linden.
“But I can’t—”
“Go,” said his king.
oOo
Kestrel went, and with a fair portion of sullenness, too. What those two had been doing alone in the wood, he could well imagine. She had been dreaming of it all her life. And Linden had a look—he would not fail to notice Sparrow again. Oh, no.
The Grey Horse camp welcomed him with every evidence of gladness, and none of the cool distance that Kestrel had met earlier. But of course: he came alone. None of the People came with him. He was dressed in their fashion, too, and walking as they would remember, striding long-legged among these shorter, quicker people.
This was his homecoming. They did not make a show of it. There was no dancing, no feasting. But people greeted him, smiled at him. His escort of children appeared as it always had, running on as if he had never been gone: “We went hunting. We shot a squirrel. Would you like to see?”
“In a while,” Kestrel said.
He saw how they glanced at one another and winked broadly. His teeth set. It would be a sore disappointment to them if Sparrow cast him out before he could speak a word, or refused to let him enter her tent at all.
She did not drive him away from the tent. The flap was not fastened; he lifted it and slipped within, pausing in the sudden dark after the bright daylight. As his eyes found their balance, he saw her sitting against the far wall, lit by a lamp, doing nothing. Waiting for him.
His temper had cooled remarkably in his passage through the camp. All that was left of it was the tightening of his brows in a frown. And the words he spoke, which he knew were not wise at all. “You must be happy. He finally noticed you. Was he as good as in your dreams?”
“No,” she said.
Kestrel stopped short. “Then you did—then he—but—”
She rose. Before he knew what she was doing, she was in front of him. She pulled his head down. She kissed him till he reeled. And while he was reeling, she sat him down next to her accustomed place, and stood over him, dark steady eyes and expressionless face, and said, “It’s your fault. If it weren’t for you, I would have been satisfied.”
“What?” He glared at her. “What in the gods’ name does that mean?”
“It means,” she said, “that after you, no man will ever truly please me.”
The heat rushed to his face. “You’re poking fun at me.”
“No,” she said.
“You hate me. I abandoned you. I—” At last his mind comprehended what his eyes had been seeing since he came back. “You’re bearing!”
“You noticed.” Her voice was dry. “Of course it’s yours. You were the first man I ever lay with, and the only one, until today. If there is a third, I doubt it will be soon. All he did was make me want you the more.”
“You can’t want me. You hate me.”
“Why, because you would hate me if I left as you did?”
His mind was in a roil. His heart was beating wildly. He could not seem to breathe properly. So much to understand. So much to see differently. No hate. Linden. A child.
A child.
Her cool hands soothed his cheeks. Her lips brushed his forehead. “There,” she said. “There.”
His head rested against the curve of her middle. Inside it, something stirred. He recoiled.
She stood still. He came back slowly, trembling, laying his head where it had been before. The small presence stirred again, tapping against his cheek.
He burst into tears.
Sparrow was patient—which was the most remarkable of all the things she had done. She held him and stroked him and let him find his own way back to calm. He lost it for a while in remembering who had just this morning been lying in those arms, but her words had sunk in deep.
“I thought,” he said when he could speak, “that because I betrayed you—”
“You would have betrayed your honor if you had stayed. No,” she said, “you did as you had to do. I tried to keep you here, but the goddess wanted you to go. She was angry with me for using her name against you. Your leaving was her wi
ll. What you did, what you do now, you do by her leave.”
“She was angry?” Kestrel’s heart constricted. “Did she hurt you?”
“Of course not,” Sparrow said. “I was rebuked. I had to endure your absence—and she let me know what you were thinking of me. That hurt.”
“I’d rather you hated me than hurt for me.”
“I deserved it. I lied in the goddess’ name.” Sparrow shrugged it away. She sank to her knees, face to face with him. She had laid aside her priestess-mask. The light in her eyes came near to felling him. “Oh, my beloved. It’s been so long, and my arms so empty.”
“And when you filled them first, it was with another man.”
That was petty, and cruel. Kestrel bit his wayward tongue until it bled.
“I deserved that, too,” she said steadily. “I’m not sorry I did it. Don’t try to make me say I am. But he did prove what I should have known. I’m not as Storm is, or Rain. I’m not a woman for many men. One is all I need.”
“Does it matter which one?”
She slapped him lightly, but hard enough to sting. “You know it does.”
“Will you promise not to lie with another man?”
“No,” she said.
Kestrel cursed his tongue. It kept saying the worst possible thing, the thing he knew better than to say. “And if—I promised not to lie with another woman?”
Her eyes went wide. “You would do that?”
He nodded—not too reluctantly, either.
“Don’t,” she said. “What we have, what we know of one another—it’s enough. Leave it at that.”
Her tone was clear. She was not to be moved.
He traced her cheek with his finger. Her eyes closed. He kissed her softly—barely reflecting on who else had touched those lips since the day began. “Now,” he said, “I am home.”
55
By the eve of the new moon, the scouts had brought word: there was an army riding toward the Grey Horse lands. But something else was riding ahead of it.
It came in between noon and sundown: a pair of white mares, and a pair of riders on their backs.
Kestrel could not say he was astonished to see Drinks-the-Wind, though he had thought the old shaman long dead. But the other—
“White Bird!” Linden spoke for all who knew her, with lasting astonishment.
She smiled at him. “Linden,” she said. “You look well. Are the women keeping you happy?”
He flushed crimson. Even if he could have answered, he would have been forestalled: Walker was standing in front of his father, quivering with what could only be fury. “What, by the gods,” he asked in a voice so soft it was nearly a hiss, “are you doing here?”
Drinks-the-Wind smiled down at his son from the white mare’s back. “Well met again, my child. Are you prospering? Is all going as you would will it?”
“It will be,” Walker said grimly.
“Then you must be very pleased with yourself,” said Drinks-the-Wind. He left Walker to white-faced silence, turning to bow low to Storm, and lower to Sparrow.
Sparrow seemed as startled as Walker, but considerably less furious. “Father,” she said. “I did not expect—”
“It seems no one did,” Drinks-the-Wind said. “Come, shall we settle the horses? Then I think my wife would be glad to bathe and eat and rest. We’ve ridden far. Farther I think than she bargained on when she asked to come with me.”
Sparrow’s brows rose, but she held back her questions as they all did, until everything was done as he had asked—as indeed was only proper in welcoming guests from far away.
oOo
This they had not been prepared for. Even Sparrow. Kestrel asked her when there was a moment, when Drinks-the-Wind had been taken away, and White Bird, too, and food and drink were being prepared for them. “No,” she said. “I had no foreseeing of it at all. It . . . changes things.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded uneasy. “I only know that it does. I’ve got to think. Will you do something for me?”
“Anything,” he said.
“Warn everyone you trust, beginning with the king. In the morning we’ll go to a sacred place for the new-moon sacrifice—a place that happens to be north of here, and on the path of Walker’s second army. Let our people go armed. And watch Walker! If he grows suspicious, he may turn on us too soon. I want us to reach the place of sacrifice before sunset tomorrow. Be ready. There will be no fighting if I can avoid it—but there well may be bloodshed.”
Kestrel nodded. “May I ask . . . ?”
“Tomorrow we face one another, he and I. Today I’ll see he’s distracted.”
“Be careful,” he said.
She smiled and took his hand, and set a kiss in the palm. She folded his fingers over it. “Beloved,” she said.
oOo
Walker’s tent had been a frequent refuge since he came to this impossible country. Something in the air here threw him endlessly off his balance. Women’s magic, he thought. Dark, secret, odorous magic like a woman’s private parts, overwhelming men’s strength by subtle degrees, till they sank down gibbering in corners.
He was still strong, though his temper was far less certain than he would wish it to be. His men here were ready for what was to come. His army was riding southward.
Tomorrow it would halt at a useful distance, and there wait until he sent a man with the signal. His chosen one, his young king, rode at their head—not entirely to the liking of Cliff Lion or Red Deer, but they had been appeased with promises of greatness once the new year-king was raised up.
He should be content. But that Drinks-the-Wind had come back, as it were from the dead, disconcerted him sorely. And his sister . . .
She was not a shaman. Yet she rode about as if she had been a king of men, a great lord of shamans. Everyone, even his own people, bowed to her.
The visions she gave them were his visions. His. She had stolen them as she had stolen the king of stallions.
Now Linden was seduced by her spells. Walker knew the look: the vague, dreaming eyes; the sudden lapses in speech or movement. Walker knew what she must have done when she took Linden away. Women’s magic again: magic of her body, trapping a man in coils of flesh.
That, Walker thought, might serve him better than she dreamed. Linden weakened and corrupted by magic would be all the easier to lead to the slaughter. But Walker was not entirely easy in his mind. It was this country, these people. Their magic was not stronger than his, it could not be, but it cast spells of confusion. And he had to be perfectly clear in mind and power, come the new moon.
What he needed, he knew in a flare of sudden light, a vision surely, such as were given to him most often through others’ eyes. He went seeking it, passing quietly, keeping to less traveled ways.
oOo
She was not in the tent which he had been told she shared with Sparrow. He tracked her through the children, who would tell him what their elders would not, though they stared round-eyed at his pale beauty. He must seem to them like a god or a spirit.
They led him past the camp’s edge to the eaves of the wood. Women gathered berries there—men, too, doing women’s work as if it could not sully them. He could see that some of them were using it as an excuse: baskets abandoned, rustles and giggles coming from the undergrowth.
She had gone farther in than any, to a clearing edged with brambles and difficult of access, but she had found a way in. Her basket was full; she had sat down in the grass to rest. Another had come with her, was still gathering berries, eating as many as he let fall into his basket.
As Walker paused, watching, he bent over Keen and dropped a ripe red berry in her opened mouth.
She swallowed it. He sweetened it with a kiss.
Her laughter rippled. She lay back still laughing, arms stretched above her head, wanton and merry.
The man, who was no less than the prince-heir—difficult as it was to tell one black-bearded savage from another, this one
Walker remembered, because he was a man of rank—lay down with her and lifted her tunic. She wriggled till she was rid of it. He cast off his own leggings and mounted her, and rode her as a man rides a woman, but long and slow.
She did not giggle as her sister harlots did. She smiled, sweet and rapturous, and covered that blunt bearded face with kisses.
Walker watched it to its end, which was an unconscionable time in coming. Then he watched as they lay together, murmuring inaudibly, the prince’s broad brown hand caressing her white breast.
This was not the first time, he could well see, that they had lain together. They had an air of ease that came from long familiarity.
They were still lying so, shamelessly naked, when a newcomer slipped through the brambles. It was a woman, carrying a black-eyed baby on her back and another swaddled in her arms. Keen flushed faintly and half-moved to cover herself with her arms, but her lover laughed and kissed her until she remembered again to be wanton.
The newcomer was no less so herself, half-clad as women went in this place, in leggings but no tunic. She sat near the lovers and began calmly to nurse the child in her arms.
The prince lifted the other from its cradleboard on her back, set it in his naked lap and dandled it till it crowed with laughter. Keen leaned against him, smiling down at the baby, which grinned back up at her.
Walker was so intent on them, so appalled and yet so fiercely aroused, that it was some few moments before he truly saw the infant whom the second woman was nursing. It was a perfectly ordinary child, fair-skinned, fair-haired.
Ordinary for one of the People. Not for these dark southerners.
The child finished its dinner. Keen reached for it, drawing it to her, slipping it free of its swaddlings. It was a fair child indeed, as fair as she was herself, golden-haired, longer and more slender than the other, darker infant. If it was not her own, then there must be another woman of the People among these tribesmen.
And if it was hers, then . . .
Only the thickness of brambles kept Walker from bursting in upon them. With that to stop him, he had time to think, to grow calmer, to understand a number of things.
It was an infant, but not a newborn. As it lay in its mother’s lap, he saw that it was a manchild. A son. Beautiful and perfect, and clearly robust: when the dark girlchild cooed and crowed, he roared his strength to the world.