by Judith Tarr
Cloud had not wanted to stay there. She reckoned him wise. Best he keep to this side of the river, with free escape southward if somehow the gathering should turn against him.
Tonight it was preoccupied with all that had happened: kings fallen, shamans dead, lies uncovered and power laid bare. The sounds that carried over the water were muted, the singing faint. Not many were celebrating tonight, even round the king’s fire. Linden was in his own tent at last, ministered to by his many wives, all of whom seemed besotted with him.
Somewhere in that camp was Keen’s son, the light of her heart, for whose sake alone she had come so far. Her other dearly beloved was outside by the fire, being prince to his people. He would not come to bed till late, if he came at all.
She slipped out the back, taking with her a thing or two that she might need. No one was on guard, though she had heard Cloud post sentries. Those could not watch every fingerbreadth of the river; and clouds had gathered to veil the stars and the waxing moon.
She forded the river in the dark, entering the cold swift water carefully, placing each foot solidly before she essayed another step. The river tugged at her, wrapping chill soft hands around her breasts and belly; for she crossed naked, with her clothes and the rest of her belongings on her head, to keep them dry.
At midstream the river nearly had her. Its softness turned to terrible strength. She braced, dug toes into the river-mud, and pressed on as fast as she could before the current plucked her loose and flung her downstream.
She staggered the last few steps, dragged herself up the bank and lay for a long count of breaths, emptied of strength. Slowly she came back to herself. The night wind dried her. She shivered, remembering the cold clutch of water, and sat up, fumbling into her tunic and leggings. Their warmth was welcome.
She went on as a hunter might, making herself small, stepping soft, fitting into the sough of wind in the grass, the lap of water in the river, the night-sounds of the great camp. There were guards, but those had not been watching the river. They were intent on matters closer to hand, watching the camp’s edges. She slipped through them like a shadow, unseen and unheard.
The camp dogs had troubled her mind; they were better guards by far than human men. But any that might have been roving by the river were gathered tonight near the fires, alert for such scraps as might come their way. She kept her distance from the fires and did her best not to seem furtive in ways that would rouse a dog’s suspicion. Men, too; once she was inside the camp, she was better advised to walk tall and seem unconcerned than slink and creep and look as if she had something to hide.
She did not know precisely where to go. But one place would make a beginning. It was a larger tent than she remembered, by a considerable degree, and it was pitched not far from the king’s. Walker, as king’s shaman, had preferred not to keep to the edges. He wanted a clear view of the power that he had claimed, and the tent that maybe, in the end, he would have taken for himself.
Now he would take nothing but the road into the gods’ country; if the gods were just, that would be a long and bitter journey, beset with torments. But there was a fire burning in front of his tent, and signs about it that someone still lived within.
Keen stood straight in deep shadow, breathed deep, smoothed her tunic and leggings. After a moment’s thought she loosed the bone pins that had held her plait wound about her head, and let it slither down her back to brush her thighs behind. She must look as much at ease as she could, and as empty of either anger or hate, though both were seething deep within her.
Calmly then, as if she had every right in the world, she entered Walker’s tent.
oOo
It was brightly lit, prodigal with lamps—proof in itself of his new wife’s wealth. The reek of burning fat, scented with some sickeningly sweet herb, made her gorge rise. But she kept it down.
There was no one here in the outer room. No one on guard, no one watching for just such an invasion as this. Blossom’s belongings were everywhere in towering heaps. Only one corner was cleanly bare, with a bed spread there, and a single basket near it. Of Walker’s possessions there was nothing else.
Keen’s lips thinned. So. He had not lived here. But his wife had—and she would know what Keen needed to know.
She was rather obviously within. Her shrieking had stopped, but her voice rang out at intervals, snapping orders, reprimanding someone for clumsiness, lamenting her grievous fate. Her father, it seemed, had not sent anyone to fetch her back to him, nor had her mother come to comfort her in her widowhood.
Another voice spoke briskly and with an air of one who had said such things many times since Blossom was led away from the king’s circle. “My dear,” said Willow, “you can hardly expect your family to come for you, in the circumstances. The king and the shamans will have to judge you first, and decide what is to become of you.”
“Judge me?” Blossom’s voice rose sharply. “What is there to judge? The man was a liar. He deceived us all. His death was just.”
“Women do not have that power of life or death,” Willow said. “We bring forth life, yes, raise it and nurture it, and when it ends, we lay it in the earth. But we are not permitted to take it with our own hands.”
“Men kill men,” Blossom said, “and boast of it at tedious length. Should I be out by the fire, then? Should I be boasting? I have blood on my hands, just like a man. Just—like—a man!”
She shrieked the last of it, quickly muffled, but not before she had roused someone else.
That voice of all in the world, Keen knew as she knew her own. Summer’s glorious bellow quelled even Blossom’s carrying on.
Keen was moving before she even thought, bursting into the inner room. She took no notice at all of the women who filled it, the eyes staring, faces white, astonished. She saw only one thing: her son in a stranger’s arms, roaring his rage.
She swept him into her embrace, clasped him tight, covered him with kisses. His tears were salt, his hair sweet, its scent so blessedly familiar that she wept.
His outcry had stopped. Summer always had been less inclined to cry if she was there. He knew his mother, Rain had liked to say, even as she gave him the breast that he was clamoring for.
Keen sank down where she was, not caring if women had to scramble out of the way, and cradled him in her lap. He was staring at her, wide blue eyes beneath a crown of yellow curls.
She found a smile for him. He smiled back, a broad reckless grin. There was none of Walker’s close-mouthed caution in this child. He was as brilliantly easy a creature as Linden. That grin was strikingly like Linden’s, sun-bright and utterly free of care or fear.
“Thank the gods you came!”
Keen looked up startled. Blossom had pulled away from Willow’s embrace, and found her wits again, too.
“I was beside myself,” she said. “In he came, no warning, no greeting, just dropped this thing in my lap and ordered me to look after it. And no reason why, either. What did he do, steal it from you? Is it his?”
“Yes,” said Keen. It seemed answer enough. Whatever she had expected, it was not this perfect self-righteousness—though it made her want to laugh till her sides ached. Oh, what a match for Walker this woman had been!
She had killed him. She was clean now, the blood washed away. She had no more remorse than a warrior after a battle, and no more concern for the rights or wrongs of it, either.
Blossom’s eyes rested on the child in Keen’s arms. He was fed: he had the look. The woman from whom Keen had taken him was one of those who seemed to be always bearing or nursing, and often both at once. Her belly was swollen, her breasts full even after Summer had drunk his fill.
Blossom made a sound, drawing Keen’s attention back to her. “You will take it away, won’t you? It bellows like a bull. I can’t sleep for the racket it makes.”
“I will take him,” Keen said. “You need have no fear as to that.”
“Good, then go,” said Blossom. “I want to sleep. I need to sleep
. My head aches. Oh, it aches so terribly!”
Keen had not thought much past finding Summer. If she had, she would have supposed that it would take her hours, perhaps into daylight, to find him. Then she would go back to Cloud in the southern camp, and whatever followed would be no affair of hers.
He had been in the first place she came to, cast there with so little regard for his life or comfort that if Walker had been alive, Keen would have happily gutted him all over again. She wanted desperately to take her child away from it. But it was night still, and Summer would not take kindly to the river crossing.
Willow seemed to see her trouble. “Come,” she said, “I’ll take you to my husband’s tent. Aurochs is there. He’ll look after you.”
“You can’t leave me!” Blossom shrilled. “You have to stay here!”
“I do not,” said Willow. “Come, child.”
But Keen paused. “This is a dead man’s son. A dead shaman—however discredited he may be. What if—”
Willow would not let her finish. “Aurochs can protect him. Come.”
Keen went, because she could think of nothing better to do. Blossom tried to follow, but Willow restrained her firmly, handed her to the burliest of the women, and bade them guard her till morning. Only one came with them: the silent and sleepy-eyed nurse, whom Summer would need again before long.
Aurochs was asleep, but he woke quickly enough at his wife’s touch. Nor did he need overmuch explanation. “I’ll send a man to watch her,” he said of Blossom—“and the more fool I for not doing it sooner.”
“Yes, you are a fool,” Willow said without sympathy. “I’ve had my fill of her, myself. If you don’t terribly mind, I’m going to sleep—and, child, so should you. We’ll keep the baby between us. No one will touch him or take him away.”
Keen sighed. The fist that had been clenched inside her was opening slowly. She was suddenly, profoundly exhausted. She barely noticed where she was taken, except that it was deep within Aurochs’ tent, surrounded by his women, and Aurochs himself stood watch without.
Then, with Summer in her arms, she could rest. It mattered little what came after, if only he was safe, and she could be sure of it.
63
The shamans of the plains came late in the morning, but come they did, crossing the river in a sour-faced company and entering the Grey Horse camp with the air of men who stooped far below their proper station. That a woman forced it upon them, none of them was likely to forget.
Sparrow was her father’s heir, and her station therefore was far above theirs. It must gripe them sorely to look at her among these outlandish people, and know that she was stronger than any of them.
After she sent the shamans’ messenger away, she had tormented herself with doubts and fears. If she had judged wrongly, not only she would suffer for it. Shamans’ curses were never to be taken lightly.
As she watched that small company of men on horses ride up out of the river, her spirit eased a little. Most of them were old. All had some deformity or some strangeness of face or form. Many carried in them the light of the spirit that she had always been able to see, and that Walker had never had.
None could match her strength. What she did as she breathed, simply by emptying herself of thought, they had to win by great workings of magic, invocations of gods and spirits, raisings of sacred smoke, even sacrifices of blood.
Her spirit was washed in the blood of two great shamans. The life of a third had been given in her name. She needed no sacrifice. She needed simply to be.
She received them in simple state, dressed in the fashion of the Grey Horse. Kestrel’s brows had climbed when she came out of the tent, but he had mercifully kept silent. No one else remarked on it. All the women here were in leggings and nothing else, this time of year.
Sparrow had never flaunted herself so. She had to fight the urge to cover her breasts, even as fine as Kestrel averred they were. She wanted—needed—the shamans to see all that she was: woman, and bearing, and marked richly with the signs of a shaman. Where the other women wore necklaces or collars of bone or beads or stone, she wore only Old Woman’s stone in a cage of woven thongs, white deerhide clasping the black starstone.
It was easier if she thought of herself as clothed in power. That, after all, was what she wanted the shamans to see. She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. The child shifted inside her as if in sympathy.
oOo
Cloud welcomed the shamans as they entered the camp, saw that they dismounted and their horses were tended, and offered them a greeting-cup full of the berry wine of his people. They were not displeased to be so greeted: he was a man, and it was known that he was a prince.
When they had drunk from the cup, though warily and only after he had drunk himself, he led them into the circle of tents. Sparrow waited there under a canopy, seated on a white horsehide as if she had been a king.
She was not going to be gentle with them. She could not afford to be. She let them stand in front of her, with the sun beating down on bald or greying heads. When after a stretching while she spoke, it was not to invite them to sit in the shade. She said, “You summoned me in the night. Why?”
“Surely you know why,” said a tall man with a face marred by a wide blood-red stain—Red Deer shaman, as she recalled. His lip curled slightly, though his tone was polite enough.
She tilted her head. “I prefer that you tell me,” she said.
“Such were the sleights your brother made use of,” said Red Deer shaman, “and so deceived us all.”
Sparrow’s brows rose. “Even you, sir? You have eyes; you could see. And yet he deceived you.”
Red Deer shaman lowered those eyes she spoke of, but not in submission. There was anger beneath the smoothness as he said, “Some of us are so powerful that we can conceal it utterly, and seem as nothing in the spirit. So we reckoned him. And his visions were true.”
“Indeed they were,” she said. “They were mine.”
He might have thought to sneer at that, but when he looked up to speak, she let him see all of what she was. He flung up his hand with a cry.
She smiled, a stretching of lips over teeth. “Did you think,” she asked him, “that what you saw before was the whole of it? I, too, can hide. I, too, can pretend, if there is need. For years I hid and pretended and let my brother steal my visions. What could I do, after all? I was only a woman. I could never be a shaman.”
“Nor can you be one now,” said Red Deer shaman. “Not among us.”
“No?” Sparrow shrugged slightly. “Maybe not. Maybe I’m meant to be more. Priestess, servant of the gods. Horse Goddess’ chosen.”
“A woman cannot be—” one of the lesser shamans began.
It was not Red Deer shaman who silenced him. Tall Grass shaman had let the other speak for them all. He looked terribly weary, worn down with the duties that she had laid on him, and with grief, too: for it was his daughter who had killed the false shaman, and his ally and son-in-law whom she had killed.
Now he spoke, slowly but clearly, and more strongly as he went on. “Woman rode the mare long before man rode the stallion.”
Some of his fellows gasped: shock or surprise, or outrage at his speaking so publicly of a mystery? Sparrow thought perhaps the last.
“Horse is a goddess, and not a god. So it has been known to us from the dawn time. But to speak of it before all the people, to confess it to those who knew nothing of the mystery, and nothing of the truth—”
“—must be done,” Sparrow said. “The lies have gone on long enough. A man took the horse away from a woman, and earned Horse Goddess’ wrath, though that was terribly slow to rise. Then a man took the visions from a woman, stole the power that was hers, that the goddess had given her; and that roused her ire far more swiftly. Horse Goddess is not pleased with the people of the plains. That they worship her children, she reckons right and proper. But how they choose to do it, and what they have done to her chosen—that, she likes not at all.”
/> “Are you demanding,” said Red Deer shaman, “that we lift the ban on the women? What will follow? Women riding to war? Women claiming to be kings?”
“Why not?” said Sparrow, though it was hardly wise.
“Surely,” Tall Grass shaman said, “all that will not be necessary. No warriors; no kings. But if women could ride the mares, or mount children on them, think, brother, how much swifter the marches would be, and how much easier to defend against raiders.”
“Women riding!” Red Deer shaman looked as if he had swallowed a live coal.
“You will settle that,” Sparrow said levelly, “in as little time and with as much plain sense as possible. So the goddess bids you. You will begin today. You will do it now.”
They were not so easily dismissed. “There is still another matter,” Tall Grass shaman said. “Your brother—”
“He lies still above ground?” Sparrow could not call herself surprised. Angry, yes. “You did not entrust him to Earth Mother as soon as the sun fell? Did his spirit walk? Whom did he beset, then? Whom did he drive mad?”
“No—no one.” That was a young shaman, strikingly young for that company, and pleasant to look at, too, but for a twisted arm. He seemed startled that he had spoken, but once he began, he gathered courage to go on. “Lady, my brothers and I, we watched over him all night long. His spirit hid inside his body and pretended that it was alive. That was why—that’s what—we couldn’t bury him. Because, you see. He wouldn’t leave.”
Sparrow believed him. She had not foreseen it, but much of what Walker did had skirted the edges of visions.
She glanced at Tall Grass shaman. He nodded, though she had not needed him to assure her that the boy spoke truth. “We performed the rite of opening and the rite of freeing. He only held the tighter to the bars of his body. We called on the dark gods to fetch their own. They bade us do it ourselves. If the dead will not go, the gods have no concern with them.”