by Judith Tarr
It echoed impossibly. It shook men from their feet. It cast down the men of Cliff Lion and Dun Cow who had come to see a king-killing and been moved by a shaman-killing to attack the people who were there before them.
Walker kept his feet. Whoever had freed Sparrow from him was gone. He had a second figure by the throat: Linden, white-faced and helpless, frozen in fear of the black blade that rested, oh so lightly, on the great vein of his neck. Sparrow, with shaman’s eyes, could see the life pulsing in it, rapid as a bird’s.
“Brother,” Sparrow said, clear and cold—words that did not belong to her at all, but were spoken through her—“if it’s kingmaking you would be doing, your hand cannot be the one that takes his life. Where is your new king, then? What’s become of him?”
“Here.” Kestrel said it in something like sorrow, standing over a crumpled shape. As people stared at the black blood on the pale hair, he sighed. “He came at me while I was driving your brother away from you. I struck before I thought. I only meant to stun.”
“Pity he wasn’t king already,” said Rain behind him. “His kingship would have been the briefest in the world—and you would have won it.”
Kestrel shuddered. “Gods forbid,” he said.
“No matter.” Walker snapped the words, drawing their eyes back to him. “In this country, a shaman can be a king. Why not in the north as well?”
“In this country also,” said Sparrow, “a woman can be a shaman. And your power is a lie.”
“All the power I need,” he said, “is in my hands.”
“If you kill him, the gods will curse you.”
“Empty threats,” he said.
All the while she held him with words, shadows stalked him, softer than wind in the grass.
One leaped. He whipped about. His knife bit deep. The figure fell.
Linden was free. Another of the shadows thrust him aside and sprang on Walker.
Linden reeled toward Sparrow. His weight drove her backward, spinning out of the battle, till they stumbled and fell beside the black stone. He was alive and unhurt, breathing in gasps.
The stone’s power was so strong that Sparrow could barely see. She crawled toward it, pulling herself up onto it.
Her bones felt as heavy as the world. But the stone, for all its cold darkness, had fire in its heart. She called it up into her bones and drew it into the stone about her neck. When both stone and bones were burning with a terrible beauty, she set it free.
59
Kestrel was one of those who stalked Walker, but it was another who sprang first—and suffered for it. As small as it was, and quick, he thought it might be Rain; Cloud he saw circling, and Aurochs crouched low and closing in when Rain fell.
He grappled with Walker. The knife dropped. Kestrel swept it up before Walker could win it back.
Then the fire came down. The stars descended in tongues of flame. Walker’s allies had come armed with spears, that now blazed up like torches.
The spears’ bearers recoiled. The spears stood erect with no hand holding them, a ring of fire. It blazed as bright almost as daylight, but redder, as if tinged with blood.
Rain was down, Cloud crouched over her. Walker twisted free of Aurochs’ grip, wheeled and bolted straight through the ring of spears.
Fire licked at him, but he darted away from it. It caught the end of his long white-gold plait. He ran on, trailing fire and smoke and a pungent stench.
Kestrel sprang in pursuit. But his way was blocked, and not only by Walker’s allies. His own people were standing stunned, staring at the fire from heaven and at the figure who stood on the black stone. Sparrow was a flame herself, fire licking from her fingertips, from her lips, from the crown of her head. It streamed down her body like water. It poured back into the stone.
Kestrel too was caught by the sight of her—briefly, but long enough. When he looked again, Walker was gone. He had vanished into the night.
oOo
In that rain of fire, the battle ended. There were wounded: tribe had fought with tribe before the fire came down. And there were dead, two figures lying crumpled near the stone.
One was a man whom Kestrel vaguely recalled, a man of the White Stone People—not of Red Deer or Cliff Lion—whose name had been Ash. He was prettier than Linden, and if possible less quick of wit. Kestrel had been astonished when he learned what life he had taken, not even meaning it, thinking only to defend himself. That was Walker’s year-king?
The other who had died was Rain. Cloud tried still, as if possessed, to bring her back to life, but her throat was cut across.
She had died as Ash had, in a backwards stroke without particular intent. Drinks-the-Wind, as great a shaman as he was, had not been enough to sate the gods. They had been terribly hungry, and thirsty for blood.
Now surely they were sated. They had had a great sacrifice, the greatest since the dawn time: two shamans and a man who was to have been king, felled beside the black stone that fell out of the sky.
oOo
Walker’s allies, deserted by their shaman and bereft of their would-be king, with their spears burning down now and crumbling to ash, were easy enough to subdue and take captive. Kestrel saw to it, and Linden recovering from his confusion. Fear and the imminence of death had affected him strangely: he was, if not swifter of wit, then certainly clearer of mind.
He called his men together with such an air of command that Red Deer came, too, and even some of the Cliff Lion and Dun Cow warriors. Those would not lay hands on their own tribesmen, but they stood back and did not interfere while the rest were taken and bound and led down off the hilltop. Grey Horse followed, bearing the dead; all but the old shaman. Sparrow stayed behind to see to him, a duty that only she could perform, as both daughter and priestess.
oOo
Walker’s allies were secured under guard for what remained of the night. Walker was nowhere to be found. A few of the warband searched for him, but most were preoccupied with the captives and with mourning for the dead.
No one had much to say of it, but most were weary of him, and inclined to let him go. The few who reckoned that unwise were not heeded. There was too much else to think of. Too much grief. Too much anger. Time enough, they told one another, to hunt the traitor down and kill him.
Those who could sleep slept—more than Keen might have expected, in the peculiar horror of that night and its ending. She had her own horror piled on grief: both Summer and Spring were reft of their milk-mother. One of the Grey Horse women, whose name Keen did not even know, came to help as she could; she had weaned her own daughter but yesterday and was glad, she said, to relieve the ache in her breasts.
The children were looked after. But Keen, whose breasts had never been enough to keep a child alive, and whose friend was dead, could only sit in the small traveling-tent, staring into the dark.
Cloud never came, nor did she expect him. He had the offices of the dead to perform, he and his mother. He had no time or strength to spare for a lover.
She did not begrudge him the need to consider his own kin and people. But it was cold, sitting here without him, and bleak. The children slept fitfully. Spring made her uneasy: staring dark-eyed and silent, as if her mother’s death had struck her mute.
Keen rocked them and sang, and waited for the night to end. There was no sleep in her.
oOo
Late in the night, a step brought her alert from a half-doze. She turned expecting Cloud, or maybe even Kestrel, who looked out for her in quiet ways.
It was a tall man, one of the People, but it was not Kestrel.
He did not even look at her. His eyes were on the cradle, and on the bright-haired child sleeping in it.
Keen saw what he was doing in the instant before he did it. She flung herself at him. But it was too late. He had Summer in his arms.
He bowled her over, running past her, trampling her underfoot. She snatched wildly at him, raked flesh—heard his gasp and curse. He did not even pause.
He wa
s gone. She lay bruised and sore, and in her heart a great and swelling cry. It rose up and up. When it reached the brim of her heart, it poured out.
It seemed a very long time before anyone came. She knew that she should go out and find someone—Kestrel, maybe, to hunt down the thief and bring him back—but she dared not leave Spring alone. Rain’s daughter—and Cloud’s, too—had made no sound, nor moved, when her milk-brother was taken away.
Cloud came at last, and Sparrow behind him, and Kestrel loping long-legged in the rear. None of them needed her to explain. They saw the dark-eyed child alone in the cradle, and Keen’s bruises, and knew.
Kestrel smote his thigh with his fist and cursed. “Gods and goddesses and black spirits below! I knew he wouldn’t just go away. But I didn’t—”
“We all knew. But we thought him cowed—we reckoned that we could hunt him at our leisure. We should have known that Walker of all people would strike like a snake the moment our backs were turned.” Sparrow spoke calmly, but her eyes were fierce. “We’ll get Summer back. Kestrel—”
“I’ll go,” he said. “When I find him I’ll kill him—once the baby is safe.”
“Not alone,” she said. “Take the fastest riders in the warband. The rest will follow in the morning as we had intended. We’ll all go north, all of us who can, or who can be trusted. This will be settled at the river.”
“Not if I find that baby-thief sooner,” Kestrel gritted.
“At the river,” she said. “Now go, ask Linden to give you the riders. And tell him what I told you.”
“Linden is asleep,” Kestrel said.
“Happy man,” said Sparrow, hard-hearted. “Wake him.”
Kestrel snorted, not quite laughter, and went to do as she bade.
While they settled that, Keen crouched where Walker had left her. Cloud came, knelt, gathered her into his arms. She laid her head on his breast and wept, not loudly, not particularly long, but deep. It did little to comfort her.
He was weeping, too, quietly, as he held her. He had lost his clan-sister this night, the mother of his child, the shaman who had been meant to stand beside him when at last he was king. And now the son of his heart was gone.
She wept for Rain then, as she had not been able to before; and that did ease the terrible aching in her heart. But the place in it where Summer had been was an open wound, too deep and terrible to heal with tears.
oOo
When after a long while she could speak, she said, “I have to go, even if I go with the slower riders. I can’t stay here.”
He nodded. “We’ll both go.”
“But the burying—Rain—”
“Rain is—was—a shaman. Their burials are shamans’ rites. Such farewells as I can say, I have said. In the morning I’ll be ready to ride, I and others of the Grey Horse.”
He met Sparrow’s eyes as he said that, as if he defied her to stop him. But she said, “Tell them to bring their bows. We may need them.”
He inclined his head. If he was grateful not to be laughed at, he did not show it. But then, thought Keen, Sparrow would never mock a Grey Horse man or woman for lack of prowess in war. She knew how well they hunted, and how skilled they were with weapons.
So it was settled. Cloud stayed with Keen after all, though she urged him to go back to his kin. “They know where I am,” he said. “They’ll know why soon enough. Let be. Rest. It’s a hard ride we’ll have ahead of us.”
Hard not because it was long or the journey arduous; it was short enough by ways his people knew. But to hunt Keen’s child, in such fear as was in her of the child’s father, was bitter indeed.
Not even a memory of love remained, or a flicker of desire. Not even for duty would Keen take Walker back as a husband.
oOo
Two dozen of Linden’s warriors mounted the swiftest horses, took what was needful and readied to ride. Sparrow would have taken the silvermaned stallion, leaving the mare to her colt, but the mare would not hear of it. She did a thing that no mortal mare would willingly do: she passed her son to one of the Grey Horse mares who had lost a foal not long ago, left him and bade Sparrow mount her and ride.
While the mare proved herself other than simple earthly creature, Linden approached the stallion whom the mare had forced Sparrow to abandon, and mounted him. The stallion offered no objection. Linden met Sparrow’s glance, once she herself was mounted, with a flat and defiant stare. This time, his expression said, nothing in heaven or earth would keep him from the back of his beloved king.
She astonished him with laughter. Still laughing, she swept them all together, gathered them and loosed them into the north.
oOo
It was strange to be riding those ways again, that only a year before she had taken going southward. In that little time, the world had died and been born again. She had become a shaman, and was to be a mother. And here she was, riding with the king’s warband of the White Stone, and the Grey Horse to follow come morning—armies that rode where she bade them, and kings and kings’ heirs who looked to her for guidance.
The riders’ laughter as they went was bright and rather mad, laughter masking a sacred anger. Their quarry was in front of them: he had stolen a swift horse, and it seemed he had no care to keep it alive.
In the dawn Kestrel found a sign that Walker had met a company of horsemen and set off again at a killing pace. “Cliff Lion,” he said, pointing to a fallen bit of rein. It was braided in the colors and fashion of the tribe.
Some distance past this, they found the first horse. Vultures’ circling led them to it. It was still alive, its foreleg shattered. It called to their horses as they came near.
Aurochs put it out of its misery. They could not stay to bury or to butcher it; they had perforce to leave it to the vultures.
Sparrow would not let them ride as fast as Walker was riding. “We’ll need mounts that can still stand, when we come to the river,” she said.
“Two dozen riders against the full gathering of tribes,” Linden said. He shook his head, but he was smiling. “We’re mad.”
“Two dozen riders, a shaman, and,” said Sparrow, “a king mounted on a king. Remember what you are, my lord.”
“What I should be is dead,” Linden said.
“Only in the world as Walker would have it.”
“Then we must make a new world,” said Linden.
60
For all her air of headlong confidence, Sparrow was caught out of her reckoning. What Drinks-the-Wind had done, what had followed upon it, had shaken her visions, blurring and scattering them like images in water.
Walker’s allies were subdued, his kingmaking ruined, but he was alive, like a snake that, crushed and stabbed almost to death, still revives and strikes at its enemies.
He should not have lived. In every vision that showed the kingmaking failed, it had failed because both Walker and Ash were killed. In none of them had Walker lived, nor had he lived to seize Keen’s child and carry him away into the north.
When Sparrow sought foreseeing, or even guidance, in that act, she saw things that appalled her. Great wars, armies, conquests sweeping across the world—and a monster at the head of them, a golden creature with a face of light and a heart that was black darkness. This was the thing that Walker would make of his son, this king of blood and slaughter.
In only one respect did the confusion of her visions serve her. Walker, blind and deaf to things of the spirit, could not know that it was all changed; that the foreseeings she had given him of both his defeat and his victory were no longer certain.
Drinks-the-Wind’s spirit stood athwart them. In her arrogance and her softness of heart, she had trusted him. She had reckoned him an ally. But he had, after all, been the great shaman of the People. He would serve the People first and himself after, and the rest as it pleased him. In his eyes, a king of battles would not be an ill thing, even a king as blackly cruel as Sparrow foresaw.
She fought to remember the vision that had guided her before Dr
inks-the-Wind rode into the Grey Horse camp. Walker defeated, the northern tribes overcome, Horse Goddess worshipped from the south to the farthest north. And Sparrow as shaman and priestess of the goddess, serene among the people whom above all she had made her own: the Grey Horse People, the white mare’s following, Horse Goddess’ children.
She could still make that come to pass. She must. The golden king, Keen’s son, raised by his mother and accepted by Cloud as his heir, would rule according to her teaching, both wise and just.
It must be so. No other way was possible. So she told herself as she rode north on her tireless mare, with her companions trailing exhausted behind.
oOo
They did not catch Walker before he crossed the river. It was close—they were almost near enough to see him; his track in the tall grass was fresh. But he was gone and the river still some distance away, and the light was fading.
The others would have pressed on. Sparrow would have flown if she could.
She caught Aurochs’ eye, and something in it focused her spirit. “We’ll stop till morning,” she said. “We know where he’s going.”
“If we catch him before he comes to the gathering,” Linden said, “won’t it be better? We won’t have to fight all the tribes to get our hands on him.”
“I think,” said Sparrow slowly, “that it would be worse if we did kill him on the plain. He has committed great crimes against you and the People. Let the People know that, and share in his judgment.”
“He’ll seduce them,” Linden said. “He always has.”
“Not if I can help it,” said Sparrow.
She hoped she sounded stronger than she felt. She was worn down. The power that had burned in her on the hilltop was sunk to an ember. She still wore the bit of black stone, but it was only an oddly heavy, rather clumsy amulet about her neck.
They all needed sleep, and badly. As she considered that, she decided something else. “Tomorrow we’ll stay here. We’ll hunt, and eat well. The morning after, we’ll ride.”
“But—” said Linden for them all.