the Year the Horses came

by Mary Mackey

  Only three! And she would have to leave two so the plant could continue to grow in that place. She knelt and picked one plant; the rule of two was hard to follow when someone was very sick, but breaking it would be a sin against the Goddess Earth. She held the plant in her hand and apologized to it for taking it from its home.

  "Thank you for giving yourself to me," she said to the flat, dew-tipped leaves. If she had killed an animal, she would have thanked it too. Nothing was ever taken from the forest or the sea without honor and thanks. She stowed the plant carefully in her gathering basket and hurried back to the village, where she found Ama and Sabalah waiting for her.

  Sabalah shook her head when she saw the single plant at the bottom of Marrah's basket. "It's not enough, but it will have to do." She took it inside and dropped it into a small pot of water that sat steaming on the coals. The pot had already been filled with other things: poppy syrup, barks, mosses, and seeds. When the tea was properly steeped, Ama removed the clay pot from the coals and began to cool it, dipping it first into warm water, then into cold, until the potion inside was lukewarm. The final ingredients were dirt and moldy bread pounded into a paste.

  Arang, who had been tending the fire, wrinkled up his nose and turned away.

  "You're going to make him drink that?" Marrah exclaimed. The mixture looked foul and smelled worse.

  Ama nodded. "Yes, every drop if I can get it down him." She motioned to her youngest grandson, Belaun, who had watched the mixing of the medicine with fascination and disgust. "Do you think you can hold him still while we pry his mouth open?"

  Belaun shook his head. "No, even though he's sick, he's too big and he'll probably fight. I know I would if you brought that stuff to me and I didn't know it was for my own good. It smells like poison, Grandmother."

  "Never mind what it smells like," Ama snapped. "Go get some help."

  A few minutes later, Belaun was back with Hiru and Urte, two strong young men who lived in the next longhouse. Ama looked at the two men and then at the stranger, who was sleeping fitfully on his pile of sheepskins with no suspicion of what was about to happen. "Good." She turned to Sabalah. "Why don't we let Marrah try to give it to him first? He might take it from a pretty girl — woman, I mean. Sorry, Marrah. I know you came of age a few days ago, but I really haven't had time to think about it." She poured a small amount of the potion into a clay bowl, handed it to Marrah, and then turned to Belaun, Hiru, and Urte. "You three stand behind him out of sight. If he spits this out, I want you to come up suddenly and hold him down before he knows what's going on. If he doesn't drink enough of it, he's going to die." She shook her head. "Of course he may die from it, but that's a chance we have to take, and may the Goddess forgive us all if he does."

  Marrah picked up the bowl with a steady hand, but inside she was trembling. She had saved this man once, pushed the salt water out of his lungs and carried him to safety, but now, perhaps, she was going to poison him. She had never before felt what a terrible responsibility it was to be a healer. Kneeling beside the sick man, she touched him gently on the shoulder. He started and opened his eyes.

  "Hello," she said. "Don't be afraid. I know you can't understand me, but I want to help you. You're a dear, ugly thing and we've all gotten very attached to you, but, you see, you aren't getting well and we have to do something."

  "That's right," Sabalah whispered. "Talk to him."

  Encouraged, Marrah continued. "I want you to drink something. It smells terrible and it probably tastes worse, but it will bring down your fever and stop your cough — that is, if we're lucky." She put her arm under the stranger's head and lifted him up a little so he could swallow. He was looking at her in the strangest way, as if he understood every word she was saying, although that was obviously impossible. She put down the bowl for a moment and touched his lips with her fingers.

  "Open," she commanded. The stranger opened his lips. She lifted the bowl and quickly poured some of the potion into his mouth. The stranger gasped, screwed up his face, and made a terrible gagging sound. Then he yelled out a string of angry words and struck her arm, knocking the bowl out of her hand.

  Although the words were in no known human language, there was little doubt what they meant. A few moments later Belaun, Hiru, and Urte were holding him down while Sabalah, Ama, and Marrah poured the rest of the medicine through his clenched teeth. He fought them as if he thought they were trying to kill him, which perhaps he did. It was lucky, they later agreed, that he was so weak. As it was, most of the medicine spilled down his chin, but he must have swallowed enough because after a while the poppy syrup took effect, and he stopped struggling.

  "The man's like a wolf," Ama muttered as she wrapped Marrah's bruised wrist in crushed comfrey leaves and a clean leather bandage.

  "Maybe he didn't know you were trying to save his life," Arang suggested. He had watched the whole scene with great interest, made himself useful by keeping the fire fed with dry wood, and kept quiet so the grown-ups wouldn't notice him and send him outside to play. What a tale this would be to tell the other children! The stranger had no more sense than a three-year-old, and he might even be dangerous. Arang picked up the bowl and sniffed at the remains of the potion. Belaun was right; it stunk. "Maybe you scared him."

  "It doesn't matter how frightened he was," Sabalah said. "There's no excuse for what he did. He didn't just knock the bowl away. He struck out at your sister as if he intended to hurt her."

  "Lucky we took that knife away from him," Ama said as she tied up the ends of the bandage. "Suppose he had used it on Marrah?"

  Marrah was shocked. "You don't mean you think he'd try to kill me just for giving him a cup of tea?"

  Ama thought it over. "No, I suppose I don't. But he troubles me. He's not like our men. I'm not exactly sure how to describe the difference, except to say he uses his strength irresponsibly."

  Sabalah said nothing. She was thinking a terrible thought, one that she intended to share with no one: perhaps it's a mistake to save this stranger's life. Perhaps we should just let him die.

  But the stranger did not die. That evening his fever broke and never returned. Thin and pale and still given to fits of violent coughing, he lay in front of the fire, staring at everyone with hollow, questioning eyes. At first he was so weak they had to tend him in shifts, washing and feeding him like a baby. Sometimes when Marrah or Sabalah knelt beside him to spoon shells full of warm broth between his lips, he would touch their hands gently as if trying to thank them. If one of the men was taking care of him — Esku or Belaun or especially Seme — the stranger's face would brighten, and he would try to talk to them in his incomprehensible language, making complicated gestures that no one understood.

  Sometimes, however, he managed to communicate simple things. One morning, for example, he indicated to Belaun that he wanted to be taken outside. Sweeping the sick man up in his arms, Belaun carried him into the sunshine and placed him gently down on the shell path with his back resting against the longhouse.

  "Poor man," Belaun said to Marrah. "He's as light as an armful of kindling." Marrah, who was busy weaving a basket, nodded absently and went back to her work. After a time, she became so absorbed in plaiting the reeds she forgot the stranger was sitting near her. When she finally looked up again, she saw that Zakur and Laino had ambled over to sniff at him. Satisfied that he was no threat, the dogs had laid their woolly heads in the stranger's lap, and he was petting them and staring out to sea with such a lonely look in his eyes that Marrah would have traded her basket and whole morning's work for the ability to say one friendly word to him that he could understand.

  He was not always so pleasant to have around. Although he now took the medicine they offered him without protest, he could be suddenly and unpredictably rude: pushing the women away abruptly when he had eaten his fill, throwing things carelessly to the floor, resisting them when they tried to wash him even if they warmed the water first. He was particularly rude to Ama, as if her gray hair made her har
dly worth noticing — a serious mistake on his part, Marrah thought, since Ama could have turned him out to die in the forest with a word — but Ama was too busy running the family and the village to pay much attention to his lack of manners, and after a few minor incidents she simply ignored him.

  As the days passed, Marrah was not sure if she liked the stranger or disliked him, and her ambivalence was shared by Arang, Sabalah, and everyone else who came in contact with him. For a while they all wavered back and forth, feeling sorry for him one minute and annoyed with him the next, until the afternoon he did something so outrageous it brought the wrath of the whole village down on him.

  It happened about three weeks after he arrived. Once again he was sitting outside, looking at the sea. By this time he was walking, and he had made himself comfortable on a folded sheepskin, crossing his long legs and leaning back against the side of the longhouse. Marrah, several women including Lepa, and four men were standing a few paces away, talking about the Feast of the Dead scheduled to take place in Hoza.

  "I hear the new Goddess Stone is going to be the biggest we've ever tried to raise," Gorriska was saying. He was a barrel-chested young man with reddish tints in his hair and hands as broad as ax blades. Ama had given him the honor of leading the group of lifters from Xori, which meant he was both proud and worried because, although it was a fine thing to sing the first lines of the work song, there was always a chance that the leader might sing off-key or get the rhythm wrong, and the workers might falter, and the Goddess Stone slip from Her ropes, fall, and shame them all.

  "How many villages are going to send men to help lift Her?" Marrah asked.

  "Twenty," Gorriska said, and he was just about to elaborate when he was interrupted by a bellow of anger and a wail of pain. Spinning around, Marrah saw nine-year-old Majina sobbing and running for safety as the stranger tried to box her on the ears a second time. For a moment everyone was too dumbfounded to do anything but stare in disbelief.

  "He hit Majina," Gorriska gasped.

  "My daughter!" Lepa screamed, running for Majina and taking her in her arms. "The savage slapped my daughter!" Burying her face in her mother's bosom, Majina cried hysterically. She was terrified. In her whole life no adult had ever struck her. She had been reprimanded, even yelled at, but the Shore People treasured their children as sacred gifts from the Goddess and would no more lift a hand against them than burn the temple and overturn the Goddess Stone.

  Marrah knelt beside Majina. "Did you do anything? Did you hurt him in any way, dear? Try to stop crying long enough to tell us. It's not your fault, darling. When he's hurt, he's like a sick dog who bites without warning. Majina, please; calm down and tell us what happened."

  "I only..." Majina wailed.

  "Only what, dear?"

  "Only pulled his beard a little, Aunt Marrah." She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and choked off a sob. "It's such a funny color and I just wanted to know it if felt like Uncle Seme's beard or if. . ." She began to cry again. "I suppose maybe I pulled it too hard, but I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to wake him up, but he jumped like he was startled and then he...he slapped me!" Breaking down, Majina went off into another round of tears.

  "Slapped her, did he?" Lepa glared at the stranger. "Well, he's not going to slap her or any other child ever again, or I'll personally see to it that he's carried out in the woods and left for the wolves." It was an extravagant threat, one they'd never dream of carrying out, but everyone sympathized. Swooping Majina up in her arms, Lepa stormed over to the stranger, who was still sitting with his back against the longhouse looking puzzled. Lepa planted her hands on her hips and confronted him. She was a strong woman, a sailor who spent her days hauling in fish baskets, crab traps, and nets. In her late twenties and mother of two children, she ran her family with a tight hand. Like her mother and grandmother, she was slow to anger but fierce when roused.

  "You did a bad thing." She stamped her feet and shook her finger at the stranger as if she were correcting a dog. "Bad, bad, bad! You must never hit a child." The stranger looked faintly amused.

  "He doesn't understand," Marrah said.

  "Then I'll make him understand," Lepa said grimly. "Come," she turned to the others. "Help me. Let's beat the ground around him with sticks to frighten him and let him know how angry we are." In a moment everyone had some kind of stick: lengths of firewood, hoes, poles, ax handles. Surrounding the stranger in a noisy semicircle, they lifted the sticks over their heads and brought them down on the path with a thump that raised clouds of dust.

  "Bad!" Lepa yelled. "Bad man." She pantomimed hitting Majina and pantomimed Majina crying. "You must never hit a child again, never, never, never!"

  The stranger struggled to his feet and then shrank back, clearly alarmed by the circle of angry villagers. Too weak to escape, he was forced to stand in one place as the sticks crashed down around him, barely missing him. "That's enough." Lepa lifted her hand and signaled for them to stop. "I think he understands now."

  "I don't think we should leave it at this," Marrah protested. "Even if he does understand, we have to teach him that it's not good enough not to hit children; you must also love them." "Yes," everyone agreed. "We have to teach him love." Lepa drew Majina to her and embraced her warmly. "You see," she told the stranger, "you see how we love our children." She passed Majina to Marrah, who hugged the child, stroked her hair, and passed her on to the next person. One by one, the villagers hugged the little girl, calling out to the stranger to witness their affection for her. As the child passed from one set of loving arms to another, the expression on his face changed from fear, to puzzlement, to understanding, and then something close to shame.

  "Bnoah doni," he said softly.

  Lepa put her face close to his. "Does that mean you're sorry?" she asked. "Does that mean you understand?"

  "De," the stranger whispered, stretching out his arms to Majina.

  "I think he wants to hug her too," Marrah suggested. Lepa looked at the stranger uncertainly. "I don't know if I like the idea. What if he slaps her again?"

  "If he does, we'll do more than beat the ground around him, Gorriska promised.

  Lepa turned to her daughter. "Majina, if you want to let this strange man hug you, you may, but if you're afraid to go to him we'll all understand."

  Majina looked at the stranger, who still stood with his arms outstretched. "I'm not sure." She frowned. "I feel sorry for him, but that slap hurt." She folded her small arms across her chest and stood with her feet apart just like her mother. "Arang told me baby Erori knows more about people than this man does, and now I think Arang's right. Still, I do feel sorry for him." She unfolded her arms, walked up to the stranger, and stood for a moment, just out of reach. "Be good," she commanded, and then she stepped forward, threw her arms around him, and hugged him. A look of surprise crossed his face. Bending down, he folded the child in his arms and stood for a moment, holding her, his face buried in her hair. When he finally released Majina, they saw tears in his eyes.

  "He's human, after all," Gorriska said.

  "And he is sorry," Marrah said.

  It was Majina who had the last word. Kissing the stranger lightly on the forehead, she walked back to her mother. "He's not so bad," she said.

  But when Ama heard of the incident, she was not so sure. The stranger might regret slapping Majina, but there was no way to tell what he would do next. Summoning Egura, the village carpenter, she told her to put together some sort of litter so they could carry him to Hoza, since he was obviously still too weak to walk. Perhaps the Mother-of-All-Families would know what to do with him. Mother Asha was an old woman, well over ninety, and she had seen many strange things in her time.

  Sabalah was even less optimistic. Although the stranger seemed gentler now, she couldn't shake the feeling of foreboding that came over her as she watched him gaining back his strength. When she sat down next to him to eat from the communal pot, the food stuck in her throat.

  "Don't speak the l
anguage of Shara where he can hear you," she cautioned Marrah and Arang.

  "Why not?" Arang was surprised to hear his mother speak with suspicion of a man who was obviously too weakened by his illness to do anyone much harm. Ever since the incident with Majina, the stranger had been making a real effort to be friendly to the children of the village, and Arang was beginning to like him a lot. He was fascinated by his gold earrings and long knife and the idea that he had come from somewhere no one had ever been before, not even Sabalah. Only yesterday the stranger had spent the whole morning carving a toy animal modeled after the one that hung from his necklace. When he had finished, he had picked up the animal and pranced it around on the floor, snorting and making high-pitched cries. Then he had laughed, tossed the toy to Arang, and said something that Arang would have given anything to understand.

  Instead of answering Arang's question, Sabalah merely repeated that he and Marrah were only to speak the language of Shara in the privacy of their own sleeping compartment. "I have a feeling that if he heard us talking, it could bring bad luck," she said. It was a feeble explanation, but all she had to go on was an ache in the pit of her stomach and the uncomfortable sensation that something was going wrong. Whatever it is, it's coming this way and I'm powerless to stop it, she thought, as she lay awake at night listening to the wind in the thatch. But perhaps I'm mistaken; perhaps it's nothing; perhaps this feeling will pass.

  But instead of passing, the feeling grew worse. Gradually, Sabalah felt the world around her grow more menacing. Things that had formerly given her pleasure were no comfort, and although she could see that the sun was shining and her children were in good health and all was well, she couldn't feel the joy such sights should have brought her. A few days before they were supposed to leave for Hoza, she asked her partner, Mehe, to move back to his mother's longhouse for a while. Mehe was Arang's aita, a large man with a bushy beard as dark as winter honey. He was sharp-eyed, intelligent, and kind and had a fine sense of humor, but although he had been her partner for three years and she loved him, her heart was no longer in their lovemaking.