the Year the Horses came

by Mary Mackey

  On that warm spring afternoon, a mere two days after they arrived in Itesh, Marrah, Stavan, and Arang stood on the platform far above the crowd watching an endless procession of worshipers dance by, pounding their feet to the deafening beat of hundreds of drums. As Marrah watched, her feet tapped, her hips swayed, and her arms moved, but all very discreetly. Drums had always set her blood on fire and made her want to stamp and sing, but for reasons of propriety and that sticky thing called politeness, she was trapped up on the platform like an old woman whose dancing days were over. Ah, to be down there with them! she thought. Arang and Stavan must have been thinking the same thing because they too were dancing in place, which was understandable, because who could resist those drums? They pounded and echoed, drowning out everything, seducing you until your heart beat with every stroke of the sticks. She'd never heard such drumming. The drummers of Itesh were even better than Rhom's cousins had promised.

  She looked longingly down at the dancers, who were already half lost in a state of ecstasy that would last the better part of a week. Mixed in among them were the various work and recreation societies of Itesh, each dressed in matching costumes. Most were animals: the Society of Cheesemakers pranced along in goatskin capes, the Society of Men and Women Who Hunt wore fox and marten masks, and the Society for Festivals had decided this year to costume its members as plump partridges. Each society carried a statue of the Goddess mounted on a wooden platform. The statues were huge, mostly made of wood or sometimes clay, some so heavy it took as many as twenty men and women to carry them, but from Marrah's viewpoint the Goddess-bearers looked as if they were holding air on their backs. They danced too, chanting and weaving back and forth in a serpentine pattern, and as they danced, the Goddesses on their backs danced with them so that, seen from above, dancers, bearers, and images all seemed to be part of one long brightly colored serpent that had wound its coils around the city.

  Here came the Snake Goddess Herself, blue and glittering, made from a twisting frame of wicker covered with hundreds of carved wooden scales; here She came as Bird floating above the crowd, a giant kite of brilliant feathers. The Goddess as the Sea was alive and waving to everyone, throwing kisses from the back of a great dolphin made out of linen and wheat paste, while the Goddess as Bull Head sported giant red Horns of Consecration decorated with tassels that waved gaily in the wind. There was a lull, and then the Goddess of Death appeared, a stiffly stylized figure made to look exactly like the stiff bone and alabaster statues the people of Gira put in the graves of their dead. She was followed by a procession of men and women beating their breasts and singing laments in Old Language, but even the mourning songs sounded rather cheerful, and if you listened to the words, Marrah realized, they were frankly bawdy. Right behind the Goddess of Death, almost treading on her heels, came the Goddess of Fertility, woven of straw and flowers. She was borne along lying on her back with her legs in the air as dozens of small naked children scrambled out from between them, but it was her attendants who attracted the most attention. There must have been twenty or thirty of them, all dressed as giant babies. As they passed the reviewing stand, they shook their rattles and broke into a song about how they loved to suck at their Mother's breast.

  The crowd roared with laughter, and Marrah, Stavan, and Arang laughed along with them and threw flower petals down on the "babies," who were growing more outrageous by the moment. On the other end of the platform, Desta and Olva, the twin priestess queens of the island, were also laughing, as was the Council of Elders. Itesh was a moderately sedate place for most of the year, but during festival time anything was permitted.

  There was no one else on the reviewing stand, which was a pity, Marrah thought, because only from above could you really appreciate how long the snake of dancers really was, but the central platform was a place of honor — such honor that between bouts of longing to dance she felt guilty and a little embarrassed to have been put so high above the crowd. Their places should have gone to some old wise man or woman, or a priestess, or a visiting village mother, but the twin queens themselves had ordered them up, pointing to the pilgrim's necklaces around Arang and Marrah's necks and insisting that Marrah was their own niece, adopted by them both when she was hardly old enough to hold her head up.

  That wasn't strictly true, of course. According to Sabalah, the Queen of the East and the Queen of the West had only blessed Marrah at birth, not adopted her, but no amount of protest could keep Desta and Olva from heaping hospitality on them. There had been a prophecy, they had informed Marrah not ten minutes after officially welcoming her to the island: the last Yasha, the old retired priestess queen who had died last winter, had told them she was coming and bringing her brother and a yellow-haired ghost with her. Well, this Stavan person was clearly not a ghost, but he did have yellow hair. Frankly, they confided, he was the biggest, ugliest-looking thing they had seen in a long time, but she needn't worry because they both adored all the wonderful and strange things the Goddess had placed on Her earth. Didn't Desta have a tiny lion-colored wildcat perfectly tame and no bigger than a rabbit that had been brought all the way from the hot lands of the south? And didn't Olva, who was head priestess of the Western Temple and thus Queen of Death and Water, have a strange lizard skull that was kept most respectfully on display in the temple for everyone to see and marvel at, a skull bigger than two grown men, one that might have belonged to the Goddess Earth Herself in those long-ago days when She took on animal forms to walk among the beings She had created?

  Rhom's cousins could do as they pleased, but Marrah, Stavan, and Arang had to accept the place of honor on the reviewing stand. Anything else was out of the question. Everyone in the entire city of Itesh would be offended, not to mention annoyed, if they were deprived of a chance to gawk at the yellow-haired stranger. It didn't do to make people cross at Snake Festival time. It was bad luck. Hard feelings had been known to make Hessa coil her body and start an earthquake that toppled houses and swamped the boats in the harbor.

  Stavan, who had not been at all offended by being called big and ugly, had smiled at the crazy idea that the Earth might move under them like a big snake, but Marrah had taken the warning seriously. Sabalah had told her about earthquakes, and besides, she had learned long ago that it was a good idea to listen when great priestesses were in a predicting mood. Besides, a request from Desta and Olva would have been hard to refuse even if they hadn't been priestess queens: they were small heavy women, in the prime of middle age, dark-browed and sharp-eyed, with wild blackish gray hair that hung down to their hips, and their voices, although sweet-toned, were loud and clear. They were so much alike that if Olva hadn't had a narrow band of pure white hair that began at her forehead and fell down her back like a scarf, no one would ever have been able to tell them apart. They reminded Marrah of two proud birds, falcons perhaps, though that might be too fierce a comparison, since they were motherly as well as queenly.

  Together, the two queens were irresistible. So, swallowing their embarrassment, they had accepted the place on the reviewing stand, and now Marrah was glad of it — or as glad as she could be, considering the drums. She tried to tell herself that it was sweaty and crowded down below and she wouldn't enjoy being half trampled, but her feet kept on dancing.

  More images of the Goddess came by, more dancers. The sun grew hot despite the shade, but she was too absorbed in the spectacle to care. Once she thought she spotted one of Rhom's cousins weaving back and forth behind a group of drummers, but she couldn't be sure. Five days of this, she thought, five days up here being the honored guest; I'm not going to be able to take it. I'm going to do something silly and disgrace all of us. I'm too young to hold still when the drums are beating.

  She took Stavan's hand and held it for a while. She wanted to ask him if he too longed to join the procession, but the noise made any conversation impossible. Stavan smiled and kissed her on the cheek. Putting his mouth to her ear he yelled something: "Love...drums." Either he was saying that he loved he
r or loved the drums, she couldn't tell which. Putting her arm around his waist, she drew him close, and they stood together watching the procession pass.

  That night as they sat in the small, simply furnished guest room of the Eastern Temple, drinking cups of spiced wine that the queens had sent over with their compliments, Stavan talked about how excited he'd been by the first day of the festival. Arang was even more enthusiastic. Getting to his feet, he danced around the room to the sound of the drumming, which could still be plainly heard, although it was a bit muffled now, having taken itself over to the other side of town.

  "I'd give anything to be out there dancing!" Arang panted as he fell back on the cushions, his cheeks pink with excitement. "Why, I'd get in front and lead that snake around the city so fast you two old people couldn't keep up."

  They laughed and said they could outdance him any day, but none of them had the nerve to tell Desta and Olva how much they longed to sweat and bend and stamp their feet to the beat of the drums, so the next morning they were all back on the platform again being honored.

  This time there was no procession of images. It was the day the new baby twin priestesses were to be chosen, and mothers had come from all over the island, bringing their twin daughters with them. It was quite a sight to see so many pairs of identical babies crawling toward the pile of sacred objects that would determine which two would someday be queens, but other than that Marrah remembered little of the ceremony. A few of the babies pulled at her skirt and even crawled up in her lap, and she spent a pleasant enough morning cooing to them and rocking them in her arms.

  In the end two little girls from the southern part of the island were chosen — or, rather, chose themselves by picking the right objects — and Desta and Olva consecrated them by rubbing olive oil mixed with red ocher on their foreheads and giving them big kisses while everyone cheered and stamped their feet to show they approved. Meanwhile the snake dancing went on elsewhere; in fact, it never stopped, so everything in Itesh was done to the beat of the drums.

  By the third day, Marrah had had enough of being a spectator. All night the drums had pounded in her dreams, and she had danced imaginary dances of great beauty. It was disappointing to wake to the prospect of still another day on the reviewing platform, and as she lay in the cool predawn light listening to the real drums beating, she decided it couldn't do any harm to ask one more time for permission to dance.

  She left Stavan and Arang asleep in the temple guest room and made her way to Desta's house, which she found by asking directions from a group of bleary-eyed people who were staggering toward the beach to sleep off the effects of the Snake Dance, which was (of course) still going on.

  The house of the Queen of the East was like dozens of others, shaped like an oval with cobbled floors and red goddess signs painted above all the doors; big enough to accommodate Desta's children and grandchildren but not luxurious in any way. "Priestess Queen" was a religious title that conferred many duties but few honors on the women who bore it. In exchange for helping Olva preside over the Greater Island Council and leading her half of the ceremonies, Desta got a good seat on the platform at festival time, but neither she nor Olva had a palace, much less attendants or luxuries. They worked like everyone else, only harder — wove and farmed and cooked and fished and mothered and governed as the mood struck them — and when they had served as queens for twenty years they were expected to retire without protest and let the new twin queens take over. It had never occurred to anyone that they needed guards at their doors or special clothing or delicate food. The beautiful robes and adornments they wore on public occasions were the property of the temples and would be passed on to the next queens.

  Marrah found Desta already awake and putting wood on the family cooking fire. She was wearing a simple linen shift, but her hair had already been woven into the formal braids she would wear on the reviewing platform.

  "What can I do for you?" she asked briskly when she spotted Marrah in her doorway. Flushed with embarrassment and stumbling over the words, Marrah begged to be allowed to dance with the others.

  "It's not that I don't appreciate the honor of being on the reviewing platform," she explained, "but they all look like they're having such fun down there."

  To her relief, Desta laughed. "Go on," she said. "Go dance if you want. Olva and I didn't mean to hold you captive. I've seen your feet twitching and your hips swaying. We've honored you quite enough, haven't we? I forgot how young you are. Why, when I was your age, I danced through a pair of sandals every festival. But if I were you, I'd make my little brother stay out of the crowd. I know he wants to dance too, but he's too young and too short; he might accidentally get stepped on. Also, there are religious customs connected with the dance that might make a boy of his age uncomfortable." She smiled.

  "I know it won't be easy breaking the news to him; I can see he's a born dancer, but tell him there'll be a special Children's Snake on the last day and he can join it if he likes. Tell him I'll even see to it that he gets a mask — something exciting like a white-tailed eagle or a speckled whip snake."

  Marrah promised to do her best to keep Arang up on the reviewing stand. He wasn't going to like the idea of waiting two more days to dance, but Desta was probably right: from what she had seen of the Snake Dance, it didn't look suitable for children. Thanking the queen, she turned to go, but she was no more than two steps out the door when she remembered she'd promised to ask permission for Stavan too. Going back, she interrupted Desta's breakfast preparations a second time.

  "Of course," Desta said graciously, not looking the least annoyed. "Let the stranger join in. Everyone's had a good view of your peculiar yellow-haired lover — excuse me, I mean no offense, but you must admit he's an odd-looking man — so take him dancing with you. Only" — she winked — "I wouldn't count on keeping track of him once the Snake starts twisting."

  Thanking her profusely, Marrah went back to the temple to tell Stavan the good news and break the bad news to Arang as gently as possible.

  Beat. Off beat. Beat. Off beat. This was the rhythm of her heart. This was the rise and flow of her own blood. This was the Snake Dance of Gira done to the beat of the drums.

  Coil forward. Coil sideways. Coil back. Stamp your left foot. Stamp your right foot. Be the Snake. Become the Snake. Hold the person in front of you around the waist. Hold her tightly. Press yourself against him. Let yourself be held. Let yourself be pressed against. Go back one step. Go forward one step. Forget who you are. Forget what you are. Forget man; forget woman. Be a single body. Be a ripple of energy. Be life. The Snake is life. Hessa is life. She is all their is. There is nothing but Her. There is nothing but Her drums. Step. Go forward one step. Step. Go back one step. Hold. Let yourself be held.

  That afternoon Marrah and Stavan danced the Snake Dance together; or rather they started out together, but soon Marrah wasn't sure whose hands held her around the waist. The dancing area was so crowded that people pressed against her from all sides, all moving to the same rhythms. Bare legs touched her legs and bare arms slid over her arms coated with sweat until she couldn't tell her own legs and arms and heat from the heat and arms and legs that surrounded her. The Snake Dancers were chanting a few simple words, chanting them over and over to the beat of the drums, and she was chanting them too although she was on the verge of forgetting which voice was hers.

  Come into us, Hessa.

  Come into us, Hessa.

  Give us new skin.

  Give us new life.

  A man's face floated toward her, dark-eyed and unfamiliar. As he passed, he reached out and kissed her on the lips, and she kissed him back. A woman wearing only a linen skirt and a hip belt of shells was trapped against her in a passing coil. Reaching out, she and Marrah put their arms around each other and kissed. The kiss of peace; the kiss of life itself.

  Marrah could feel the Over-mind hovering over her, the mind that was neither woman nor man. Soon It too would kiss her just as It had kissed her at Hoza whe
n she had danced around the Tree of Life, and Its message of love would fill her heart.

  This was the new skin the Girans were asking for. Once the spirit of the Over-mind descended on them, they could dance all day without hunger or fatigue. But they could also stop dancing. Two strangers could fall into each other's arms and walk away from the Snake. They could go to the beach or into one of the houses that had intentionally been left open and marked with chains of flowers and bunches of green leaves. Two strangers who had never seen each other before, and who might never see each other again, could go off together and share joy because they had been given to each other by the Goddess. This was accepted and understood and even expected.

  More faces drifted by Marrah. More hugs and kisses. No one was in a hurry, and the drums went on beating. The day grew hot and then cooler and the shadows lengthened, but she no longer noticed the passage of time. She could feel her new body, her long graceful snake body, coiling through the city of Itesh. Every human head was a scale, every pair of feet a muscle. The Snake caressed the houses; She lifted Her great head and put out Her delicate forked tongue to savor the salt air.

  A man took Marrah in his arms and kissed her. He too had dark eyes, but they were shot through with bits of light the color of the stone the priestess of Nar had given her. There was no butterfly trapped in them, but he looked like a kind man. Gently he disentangled her from the crowd and gently he led her to the edge of the dance. They leaned up against a wall and kissed some more as the Snake coiled by. He was short, exactly her height, with strong hands. A mask made of partridge feathers dangled from a cord around his neck. As she kissed him, some part of her realized that he was a member of the Society for Festivals.