Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  Linden leaned on the spear he had been given and watched. When Spear balanced the whole length of the weapon on his finger, Linden straightened. When it came spinning down into Spear’s free hand, Linden was ready. Shaft smote shaft with a clatter audible even above the watchers’ tumult.

  Spear was not to be deceived into flailing at Linden while Linden rested. He forced the White Stone king to follow him, dance with him, defend his head and neck and shoulders from the haft and his vitals from the sharp flint head.

  Linden was flagging. He had lost blood; he had taken blows from the Bull’s fists. Now the spear battered him, blow on blow. There was no opening, no path to Spear’s body.

  As Spear swept his weapon high, Linden swept low. Spear, braced for a stab to the heart, fell astonished. His spear dropped and spun away. Linden set spearhead to his throat and smiled.

  Spear smiled in return. “The gods favor you,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Linden. He drove the spearpoint home.

  oOo

  Three kings down. Three tribes taken. But there were so many more. Kestrel regarded them in despair. Linden was no longer the glorious young warrior he had been so little a while before. He was covered in bruises, stained with blood both fresh and dried. One eye was swollen shut. His lip was split.

  He grinned nonetheless, and beckoned with hand and spear. “Come. Come here. I’ll fight the lot of you—I swore it, I’ll do it. Come and take me!”

  Eyes slid. Some of the kings who had pressed so boldly to the front were nowhere to be seen. Some of the others graciously gave way to their fellows. Tall Grass, who might have been expected to defend the honor of the greater tribes, was an old man. He should have given himself to the knife at the midsummer sacrifice; that he had not spoke ill of his courage.

  There were younger kings in plenty, and some cocky enough to reckon Linden an easy target now that he had exhausted himself in defeating the greatest warriors of them all. As they jostled among one another, squabbling over precedence, a new sound brought the rest about.

  Kestrel’s knees nearly gave way. At last, but somewhat sooner than he had dared to hope, the rest of Linden’s warband had come. Men of Red Deer and Cliff Lion rode with it. The Grey Horse led it, men and bold bare-breasted women on fine grey horses, armed with their strong bows, driving back the people who crowded near the circle. No one at all had thought to post guards at the river. Everyone was here, watching the battle for the kingship.

  The shock held them rooted. No one was mounted, no one armed except the kings. And here was an army in their midst, with strangers at the head of it, and two foremost who made a striking pair: a black-bearded man and a golden-braided woman. Sparrow was riding beside them on her moon-white mare—when had she slipped away from the crowd about the circle?

  Kestrel wondered too how many people would recognize Keen. She was not at all the same woman who had run away from her husband. She rode as no woman of the People was allowed to do, and she rode armed with a bow, arrow nocked to string, aimed at the heart of the shaman who stood beside the Tall Grass king.

  Walker, Kestrel would wager, had been advising his ally to wait Linden out, let the younger kings destroy him, then claim the kingship for himself. How he would do it without winning it by combat, Kestrel did not know or much care. Walker would have conceived a way.

  Walker seemed not at all dismayed to face a bow in the hands of his erstwhile wife. He murmured in the old king’s ear. The old king frowned and seemed to protest, but Walker persisted.

  The Tall Grass king spoke then in a voice that wavered before it steadied. “My people! Seize them.”

  No one moved. Linden in the circle, leaning on the spear with an air of insouciant ease, laughed lightly and said, “You’re forgetting something, my lord. Until someone proves otherwise, I am the king of kings here. These are my allies—my kindred and my friends.” He turned his eyes to them. “You are very welcome, hut you have interrupted our game. Will you dismount and watch?”

  “Not,” said Keen, “while that one lives to poison your hope.” There could be no doubt as to whom she meant. Her arrow did not waver, even when her eyes rested briefly on Linden.

  “You had better not kill him,” Linden said reasonably. “He’s a shaman.”

  “He is a liar and a stealer of children. He is no more a true shaman than I am.”

  “There now,” said Linden. “That’s not—”

  “It is true,” Keen said. “You may go on with your kingmaking, if that is what it is. But first I will take his life.”

  Kestrel believed that she would. But Walker laughed, rich with scorn. “Fool of a woman! Get off that horse and put down the bow and have some sense. If you kill me, no one will save you. All the shamans will sing you to your death.”

  “It will be worth it,” she said, clear and cold.

  It was Sparrow who said, “Not to us who love you. What of your son? Who will raise him?”

  That stopped Keen. Her arm wavered. Her face went white. Kestrel saw Walker tense, saw the hand creep under the shaman’s robe.

  The width of the circle was between them. It was forbidden any man to enter it unless he would contest for the kingship. But Walker reached for a weapon—to kill Keen, to kill Sparrow, to kill both, it did not matter.

  Before Kestrel set foot in the circle and doomed himself, someone else moved, too swift almost to see.

  Walker gasped. His arm dropped limp. His shoulder had grown a length of carved bone: the haft of a knife. Cloud smiled at him, sweet and terrible, and balanced a second knife in his hand, twin to the first. That one, his smile said, would be delighted to pierce Walker’s heart.

  Cloud was a king’s heir. He could take a shaman’s life and be suffered to live.

  “Take them!” Walker cried in a voice gone thin with pain. “Take them as you took the others. You outnumber them, curse you! Swarm over them and bring them down!”

  Some few men moved then, perhaps in fear of a shaman’s curse. Kestrel saw how one was given pause. He found himself breast to point with a flint arrowhead.

  The archer was a slip of a girl, a curly-headed beauty whose breasts were just budded. Her smile was as sweetly deadly as Cloud’s.

  Others were not so easily halted. They surged toward the horses.

  A piercing cry stopped them short. It was a woman’s keen, shrill enough to split a man’s skull.

  All the kings, the warriors, the strong men of the tribe, were engulfed in women. Wives and concubines, sisters, daughters, even captives, surrounded them, impeded them, bound them in slender arms and long braided hair. The kings were overwhelmed.

  Not one of them could move. Kestrel, whom none had touched, realized with a faint and penetrating shock that his mother stood in front of him, and his father was beside him. “Don’t tell me you did this,” Kestrel said.

  Willow tilted her head toward Sparrow. “No, not I. She found her way to us while the kings were strutting and flaunting their manly parts.”

  “But,” said Kestrel, “in that little time, she could not possibly have—”

  “She is a shaman,” Willow said. She turned away from him, such a thing as a woman did not do to a man among the People, but Kestrel had to stop to remember it.

  Sparrow was speaking, not loudly but her voice was clear. It carried remarkably far. “It’s over now. If any king still believes that he can claim the title from the king of the White Stone People, let him remember that after he takes the king’s life, he must ride the king’s stallion. That, I promise you, none but Linden may do. Even he does it only on Horse Goddess’ sufferance.”

  “Pay no heed to her!” Walker cried out over the excessive noise that the woman nearest him was making. Her fiery hair and strident voice left Kestrel in no doubt as to who she was. Blossom of the Tall Grass had come to claim her husband.

  Her husband struck her aside with his unwounded arm, ignored her shrieks—which were more of rage than of pain—and lifted his voice in the full force of wh
ich a shaman was capable. “This is a liar, an outcast, a stealer of kings. Look at her! She profanes the very earth she walks on. She slew our father, O my people. She cut his throat with her own hand, and took his head. She destroyed the great shaman, the wisest of us all, Drinks-the-Wind whom we loved.”

  “So she did.”

  Kestrel had not seen White Bird come, but she was unmistakably there, sitting astride the old white mare who must have carried her across the river. Her hair was loose, streaming down her back. Her garment was a shaman’s robe, one of her dead husband’s, most likely. In her arms like a terrible child she carried his head, its long white hair and its white beard streaming. From either side of the mare’s shoulders hung the others: Ash who would have been king, and—great shock and no little horror to Kestrel who had, after all, loved her—Rain the young shaman of the Grey Horse.

  They were mighty in death, white and terrible, nor had the passage of days disfigured them. It was clear to see who they had been and how they had died: the shamans fearless, in exaltation; the warrior in enormous surprise.

  White Bird rocked her husband’s head and crooned to it under all their stares. “She did kill you,” she said. “Oh, yes, my lord, she took your life. You offered it—you gave it into her hands. You commanded her to take it. Because, my lord, my husband, great shaman of the People, she and only she could take the power that was in you. No one else had the strength. No one else was brave enough.”

  “The woman is mad,” Walker said. “Remove her.”

  She laughed, sweet and high. “Oh, I am mad. Divine madness. The gods whirl in me, sing to me, promise me . . . oh, wonders! But no son.” Great grief crossed her face. “No son.” She rocked her husband’s head even more tenderly than before.

  Walker stirred. Perhaps he thought to remove her himself, cast her from the mare’s back and hand her over to someone suitably strong and suitably inured to such sights as she was. But he had forgotten, perhaps, the knife in his shoulder. The movement set him reeling.

  “You are no shaman,” White Bird said as in a dream. “You never were. Look, sister of the Tall Grass, what you married. Is he not beautiful, for a lie? Is he not wonderful? Is he not a great bull of the inner room?”

  “Bull?” Blossom had picked herself up, nursing a bruised cheek. Her glare was baleful. “No bull, that. That is an ox, and in shaman’s clothing, yet. He is no shaman. He has no magic. He has no visions. He has nothing but a web of lies.”

  “Indeed,” said Keen in her new, cold voice. “He raped you, too, did he? And left you forgotten?”

  “He lies,” Blossom said, “and lies, and lies.” Her lips drew back from her teeth. “We know. Women know. Men—men are fools.”

  Walker struck at her again, to batter her down. She shrieked and sprang. She found the knife in his shoulder; pulled it free in a bright rush of blood; and stabbed, stabbed and stabbed, shrieking in pure mindless fury.

  People shrank away. No one moved to stop her. Not the kings, not the shamans. Not the Tall Grass king or his shaman, though he had been ally and kin to both. They watched in horror, with their hands at their sides.

  Even if they had ventured to move, their women would have prevented them. They stood in a wall about Walker as he died. Every one had turned her back, rejecting him and all that he had been.

  62

  At last Blossom stopped shrieking. She stood over the bloodied body. Her face was a perfect blank, like the mask of a priest.

  The silence was enormous. In it, Willow made her way across the circle—breaking the ban of kings without a thought or a flicker of fear—and with great gentleness laid her arm about Blossom’s shoulders and led her away. A path was cleared for her, women pressing back the men, watching without sound.

  It was Sparrow who spoke, softly, but every one of them heard her. “Thus falls a world,” she said. “I am my father’s heir. If any shaman fails to see it, then I reckon him blind, as blind as my late brother. There will be no more lies, people of the plain. No more falsehoods. No more thieves of visions.”

  Woman she might be, but they were cowed, all those strong warriors. They had seen the Walker Between the Worlds fall, struck down by a woman. And there was White Bird with her terrible burden, smiling, singing softly to herself.

  Her eye fell on the Tall Grass shaman. Her smile sharpened. She rode toward him. He shrank back, but his wives and daughters impeded him. White Bird halted the mare in front of him and held out her husband’s head.

  “Take it,” she said. “Drink from its cup. There’s a little power left, that he kept for you. He said—he says to me, you are not wise, not yet, but you may be. And you are all these people have.”

  The Tall Grass shaman had little choice but to take the grisly gift. It had dawned on him, perhaps, what he was being given. His eyes flicked toward Sparrow.

  “Take it,” Sparrow said. “All that he had to give, he has given me.”

  The shaman bowed—not willingly, but he was not one of those who were blind. His eyes on her were briefly dazzled as he undertook to see what power she had from her father.

  She turned from him, leaving him to his new eminence, and faced Linden in the circle. He was standing quietly, leaning on the spear, patient as she had seldom seen him. He was not terribly wounded, though there was a great deal of blood about him.

  He smiled at her, as honest as a child, but she had learned how strong he could be in that simplicity. The mare shifted beneath her. She nodded, though there were no words between them.

  She called the silvermaned stallion. He came obediently, snorting at the stench of blood and death, but his heart was strong and his courage high. “This,” she said, “is a king, and a maker of kings. Only one man of the plains is granted leave to be his rider—both his master and his servant. So Horse Goddess has decreed.”

  She nodded to Linden. He barely needed encouragement. Naked and wounded as he was, he swung onto the broad dappled back. The stallion arched his neck and pawed. Linden slapped his shoulder in pure love.

  Someone—it might have been one of the companions, or one of Linden’s warband—raised a whoop, the war-cry of the royal following. Others took it up, in pairs and handfuls and dozens, till the earth rocked with it, and the sky rang.

  The People had their king again. All of him.

  oOo

  There were kings to bury, and a shaman, however false, to send to Earth Mother’s breast. Linden, with the elders of Cliff Lion and Red Deer and Dun Cow, saw to the burial of the three kings. The tribes he disposed of as he had promised: naming each wife of that tribe regent for the heir unborn, and giving her a warrior to rule where men must rule.

  Cliff Lion and Dun Cow had had prince-heirs already, one a brother and one the father of the royal wife. The brother Linden put to death, for he was intransigent. The father was offered a place of great honor as grandfather to the heir. He, who was not an unwise man, chose to accept it.

  While that was settled, the shamans saw to their own. Sparrow sought no part of it. She had retreated among the Grey Horse People where they had camped on the southern side of the river. Kestrel followed her there silently, and stayed with her, offering nothing she did not ask for, except his return to the People. “You are my People,” he said, “and all the tribe I’ll ever need.”

  She looked him in the face. “Truly?” she asked him.

  His eyes were steady. “By my heart,” he said.

  More might have come of that, but one of the wild children who had ridden with the Grey Horse came calling at the tentflap. “Sparrow! Someone’s come for you.”

  Sparrow did not want to listen. But Kestrel was a man of excessively dutiful temper. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll be behind you.”

  oOo

  Daylight still lingered in the sky, though the sun had set. Fires were lit, oxen roasting—the Grey Horse had been given great gifts of Linden’s generosity, and the first of them was a herd of fine white cattle.

  The messenger stood by the king-f
ire, eyes fixed rigidly on his feet, while a circle of bold young women remarked on his looks. He was quite the pretty thing, paler even than Walker had been, and all but beardless. He wore the tunic and leggings of an apprentice shaman, with the necklace of bones that proclaimed him within a season of his trial and ascent to full power.

  He did not like at all to be forced to pay reverence to a woman, but like the Tall Grass shaman, he had eyes that could see. He glared at her, outraged, and said with stiff politeness, “Lady, the shamans of the peoples bid me ask you, if you will—they would speak with you.”

  “They could not come to me?” Sparrow asked. “It’s late; I’ve traveled far. I’m going nowhere tonight. Tell them, come morning, I will receive them here. They have safe passage. In the goddess’ name I promise it.”

  The apprentice flushed. “Lady! You cannot—”

  “I can do,” said Sparrow gently, “whatever the gods permit me to do. If the shamans would speak with me, they may come to me here.”

  The apprentice left at that, all politeness forgotten. Sparrow found that she was shaking—with weariness, she was sure. She slid her arm about Kestrel’s middle and leaned on him. “Gods,” she said. “I could sleep till the dark of the year.”

  Kestrel might have ventured commentary on her treatment of the shamans, but wisely elected to keep silent. She kissed his shoulder to thank him; decided that that was barely sufficient; pulled his head down and kissed him on the lips.

  oOo

  Keen watched them from inside Cloud’s tent, torn between joy for them and a deep sense of her heart being torn in two. When the Grey Horse rode away from the gathering, she had seen no reasonable way to separate herself, though her spirit cried out toward her son. Wherever he was, whatever Walker had done with him—oh, gods, what if he had been killed? What if, even as Walker died, his son lay dead in some forgotten place?

  He was alive. He must be. Someone kept him, someone in the vast camp that spread across the river. Its fires were beyond counting, its pall of smoke and dust thick even in the dusk.