the Year the Horses came

by Mary Mackey

  "It won't be easy to cross the steppes on foot, but with a little luck I'll get a horse from some subchief who owes my father a favor. I'm a good tracker, and I know the places the Hansi usually make camp. When I'm brought before my father, I'll bow down to him like a faithful son and tell him the bad news: that Achan died looking for the golden tents of Han. Achan was my father's only legitimate heir; he would have been the Great Chief of all the Hansi if he'd lived, and when I announce his death, the women will scream and moan. My father will tear his clothes and smear ashes on his face and curse the gods for letting me come back alive when Achan lies in a grave in a strange land. He'll demand to know if I made the proper sacrifices to Han to put Achan's soul to rest, and I'll lie and say I did, because..." He paused. "Well, that's another story, one we don't need to go into. Enough to say that Achan had several concubines who will be overjoyed to learn that the most important funeral sacrifices have already been taken care of, and with luck Changar, our diviner, will demand no more."

  He held up his right hand and began to count off time on his fingers. "After I deliver the message, there'll be funeral games, horse sacrifices, and six months of mourning. By the time my father has put off his torn cape and washed the ashes of grief from his body, it will be spring and I can come back to you, but meanwhile I'll become a great storyteller, a poet worthy of your memory songs. I'll tell my people about my adventures in the West, and what adventures they'll be. The West of my stories won't be a green river valley; it will be a dense forest filled with vicious little knock-kneed savages who have no cities, no gold, and no cattle."

  " 'Go west?' I'll say. 'No man in his right mind would ride in that direction. There's nothing worth taking.' And then I'll spit on the ground as if cursing the whole place and look sullen and disappointed as befits a man who has wasted years of his life wandering in a wilderness where there's not a woman worth fucking or a horse worth stealing."

  Marrah was silent for a long time. As he was speaking, she had briefly wondered if he was lying to her. It would be so easy for him to betray her people. All he had to do was go back and tell his father that the cities of the West were rich and defenseless. But those were the thoughts of a moment only. She knew him as well as she had ever known anyone, and if he had been lying she would have seen through him; if he even had been ambivalent, she would have sensed it the way she could sense an approaching thunderstorm.

  By the time he finished, she was sure he was absolutely sincere. There was no question that he wanted to save her people. The only problem was, his plan wouldn't work. At least she didn't think it would, and realizing that made her more than a little frightened, because if it didn't, what other choice was there?

  When she finally spoke, her voice was steady, but even she could hear the fear in it. She told him frankly that she wanted to believe he could save Shara, but she couldn't. Weren't there already women who spoke Shambah living in the tents of the Hansi? Didn't his people already know there were cities in the West? She realized he had offered to take a great risk for her sake and the sake of her people, and she honored him for his loyalty and courage, but what good was his plan when some little fact smaller than his thumbnail could bring everything tumbling down? So many things could go wrong. Perhaps some poor captured woman, sick with longing, had already bragged of the rich temples of her city, or perhaps some young girl, lonely for her mother, had cried out angrily that the sheep were fatter and the honey sweeter in the West.

  "No," he kept insisting. "No, you're worrying unnecessarily." He sat down, drew her close, and held her. His body was warm, like a shield against the cold possibility of failure. Slowly, and with great conviction, he explained why her fears were groundless. All the captured women had come from small villages, and if they spoke of great cities to the West no one would believe them anyway because women, he was sorry to say, weren't listened to in a Hansi camp. No warrior had ever seen a real city or even imagined one, and only warriors had the power to make things happen. So surely his father would believe him. Then, too, although he never liked to bend the truth, he had a gift for storytelling. When he was a young boy people had said he had been born to go from camp to camp singing of the gods and heroes, but then he had grown older and his voice had changed from a sweet bell to a frog's croak. Still, he had the gift. She had to understand that this was their best chance, perhaps their only chance, and it was a good one; he promised her it was. Unless he went back to the Sea of Grass, the Hansi would ride west someday. Hadn't her own Goddess warned of an invasion?

  She considered two versions of the future: in one, the Hansi warriors rode down on Shara and burned it to the ground; in the other, Shara was spared. And not only Shara was saved: the cities along the River of Smoke, the villages of Kaza, the temples of Takash, all the beauty and peace of the world was saved too — at least for a while. Stavan's plan did make sense and it just might work, but something still bothered her about it, something that went beyond the pain of being separated from him for so many months.

  "How dangerous is this?" she asked at last.

  "What do you mean?" He shifted his weight uneasily, and she knew she had touched on the one thing he'd hoped she'd overlook.

  "What if your father and the other warriors don't believe you?"

  "Oh, they'll believe me."

  "And if they don't?"

  "Then I suppose they'll call me a traitor."

  "What's a 'traitor'?"

  His answer was a long time coming. "Someone who betrays his people."

  "And what do your people do when they find out someone's betrayed them?"

  "Don't worry so much. There's no use borrowing trouble. My people will believe me. No Hansi would lie to his father unless he was planning to kill him, and everyone knows I don't want to be Great Chief. Now Vlahan, my father's bastard, is different. If Vlahan told my father the sky was blue my father would step outside his tent to see if it was true, but I have always had a reputation for being honest to a fault."

  She took a deep breath. "Stavan," she said. She paused, trying to make her voice firm because again she could hear the fear in it. "I know you're doing your best to keep me from worrying about you, but I don't want to be spared the truth. We both know if you go back to the Sea of Grass you may not come back. You could die of hunger or cold before you even reached your people. I don't like either of these possibilities. They scare me. But there's one thing that scares me even more, and that's the idea that your own people might do something terrible to you if they found out you weren't telling them the truth. Would they, Stavan?"

  He nodded reluctantly.

  "What would they do?"

  Once again his answer was a long time coming. "Kill me, I suppose."

  "Quickly?"

  He shook his head.

  "I thought so." She took him in her arms and kissed him. "How can I let you do this? I love you so much, and it's practically suicide!"

  "I'll come back."

  "Will you?"

  "I swear it."

  "How do you know?"

  He shrugged. "I have a feeling."

  "A feeling isn't good enough." Impulsively, she reached up, untied the leather cord that held the Tear of Compassion, and retied it around his neck. "Take this. It saved Arang when he was dying from the fever, and it will protect you."

  "Marrah, I can't take your magic charm. The priestesses of Nar gave you this."

  "What do you think they gave it to me for, you sweet fool? Take it and save my people, and may the Goddess bless you and protect you and bring you back safely." She leaned forward and kissed the butterfly that lay frozen in the depths of the yellow stone, and then she kissed Stavan, who was going into such great danger with only this small bit of magic to protect him.

  That night they made love, but their hearts weren't in it. They were both too sad. Afterward they lay awake for a long time talking to each other. They made plans and promises, and when they ran out of reassurances, they went on talking, afraid to let go of each ot
her's voices.

  I can feel him leaving already, she thought, as she ran her fingers through his pale hair, seeing smoke and clouds and moonlight and white bones and loneliness.

  The next afternoon, after passing through the last of the delta, they finally reached the Sweetwater Sea. From the moment they sighted open water, events moved so quickly that almost before she had time to say goodbye, he was gone, headed north with three traders who were on their way to Shambah in a dugout filled with jars of wine.

  His boat had hardly rounded the point before two salmon fishers spotted Marrah and Arang's pilgrim necklaces and volunteered to take them south. So, following the coast and blown by good breezes, the two of them came at last to Shara, whose white houses sparkled in the sun just as brightly and beautifully as Sabalah's song had promised.

  BOOK THREE

  * * *

  The Sea of Grass

  "The women of the West are ugly," the hero told his people.

  "They have faces like rats, skin like toads, and smell like male goats in rut.

  They live in caves like animals and eat filth.

  Don't bother to ride west, my kinsmen. You won't find gold

  or horses there. All the West has to offer is death."

  "He lies!" cried his brother. "The West is rich!" "

  He's a traitor!" cried his uncles. "Put him to death!"

  But the Great Chief was wiser than the rest. He ripped

  open the hero's shirt and a piece of the sun fell out. "Look!"

  the Great Chief cried. "Stavan isn't lying. He doesn't know

  what he's saying; he's been bewitched!"

  FROM "STAVAN AND THE WITCH"

  A HANSI FOLK TALE

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Shara: Two Years Later

  On her seventeenth birthday Marrah's grandmother called her to the temple that had been built beside the Dreaming Cave where Sabalah had had her vision of the beastmen so many years ago. It was a cold winter day that promised icy rain by evening, and a stiff breeze was blowing from the northeast, stirring the Sweetwater Sea into whitecaps and sending clouds scudding west to pile up behind the hills. As she climbed the path that led to the cliff above the city, Marrah could see two trading boats coming quickly down the coast, one a white-sailed raspa and the other a small dugout propelled by two figures who were hunched over their paddles and pulling to the rhythm of a sea song — a fast one by the look of it.

  She stood for a moment with her back to a wall of honey-colored granite and let the wind whip her hair into snarls as she watched the boats pitch and slap through the waves, hoping, as she always hoped, that Stavan was on one of them, but even from this distance she could see that none of the traders had yellow hair. They were all small and dark, dressed in brightly colored cloaks dyed with clan signs. The city of Shara was in the middle of the midwinter holy days, and despite the bone-chilling winds that always blew this time of year a few hardy pilgrims never failed to show up to bathe in the sacred hot spring and hear what the new year had in store for them.

  Marrah shivered and drew her fur-lined cloak closer. She wished she knew what the new year held for her, but she wasn't as lucky as the pilgrims. Although she'd lain in the Dreaming Cave four times now, she'd seen nothing, and neither had anyone else who'd looked for her, including Lalah, her own grandmother, who as priestess queen of Shara should have been granted a vision if there were any visions to be had. The Goddess Batal was willing to tell village elders how good their spring harvest would be, advise women whether or not to bear children, and predict an unusually wet summer, but when it came to the subject of Stavan or the possibility of an invasion from the east, She was stubbornly silent. When the priestesses inhaled the sacred smoke, drank the poppy wine, and begged to be told if the beastmen were still a threat, all they got was a long nap and a headache. This absence of omens was a bad state of affairs and was making everyone nervous, especially Marrah.

  She sighed and gave up trying to see Stavan standing at the bow of the raspa or hiding behind the baskets piled at the center of the dugout. She had waited two years for him to come back from the Sea of Grass — two years and three months to be precise. She'd met every boat as it docked, asked every pilgrim coming down from the north if they'd heard any news of a tall yellow-haired man, and there'd been nothing. Now she was a year older, and still he hadn't come. Despite the fact that Arang had promised to dance for her this evening, this was going to be a cold birthday in more ways than one.

  She looked away from the sea, beyond the delta to Shara, which twisted its way along the south bank of the river just as it had in Sabalah's time. The site had been sacred to the Snake Goddess for countless generations, and everything about the city proclaimed this good fortune. Built in coils like a snake, it was composed of a hundred mother houses and a dozen temples, all faced with smooth white clay. Every wall had been lovingly painted with colored lozenges and sprinkled with crushed mica so that a stranger's first impression was a line of glittering scales moving through fertile fields. The fields were brown this time of year, and the short-haired sheep huddled in small flocks, grazing on hay and dried vetch, looked awkward and fat under their winter fleeces.

  The sight of the city cheered Marrah a little. It wasn't Xori and never would be, but after two years it felt like home — or at least as much home as she was likely to have for a long time. She still missed her mother terribly, and Great-Grandmother Ama, and all the friends she'd left behind in the West, including Bere, whom she often thought of with affection; but now, for the first time in her life, she had blood relatives: uncles and aunts and cousins, all of whom had loved her mother and who immediately loved her as well.

  At first she'd been reluctant to love them back; it had been overwhelming to step out of die boat after a trip of many months and find a whole new family waiting for her, but the Sharans were like die Girans: easygoing, warm, emotionally expressive. They'd wept and hugged her when they learned she was Sabalah's daughter, and then they had swept Arang up in their arms and passed him from embrace to embrace until he was so embarrassed she had to rescue him.

  When she'd asked after her great-aunt, Queen Nasula, they'd cried some more and told her that, alas, Nasula had died long ago, but Marrah wasn't to grieve because Nasula had ruled well and now Marrah's own grandmother was the priestess queen. It was quite an experience to suddenly find yourself with a new grandmother when you were already a woman. Marrah had been timid at first, but her timidity didn't survive Lalah's first enthusiastic kiss.

  The people of Shara have been good to me, she thought, and she stood for a moment, remembering what they had done and being grateful for it. Their priestesses and priests of the city lived at the center of things, and they had trained her in ways Sabalah never could have. Great-Uncle Bindar, her mother's aita, had taught her the sacred art of pottery making, and now, although she still wasn't as skilled as the Hitan potters, she could finish a piece of work and put it in the temple kiln knowing it would come out in one piece. She was even responsible for the new temple, the one she was climbing toward this very morning. She hadn't actually built it, of course. Uncle Bindar had done that. But she had told him how to smooth the clay bricks into a single block, cover the windows with thin sheets of clay, and fire it from the inside the way the temples of Takash were fired.

  As for Arang: Uncle Bindar's partner, the great dancer Enal, had taken him for a pupil, practically grabbed him the moment he stepped on shore. "The boy's born to dance," Enal had informed Marrah. He was a little man, short the way all good dancers were; strong, with a compact body, forty years old and not looking a day over thirty, and he had a way of barking that could be intimidating until you got to know him. "Look how your brother walks; look at the sense of balance he has. Give him to me, and I promise I'll make something of him. How could you Westerners not have noticed what a treasure he is?"

  Marrah hadn't liked Enal at first and she'd refused, but once Arang heard about the offer, she got no rest until she gave
in and let him take lessons. Within two months Enal had Arang doing backflips, and by the time a year was up he was performing by himself, moving to the rhythm of the drums and the sweet droning of the three-stringed ashad in ways that made spectators catch their breath and throw flowers to him when he was finished.

  "Enal knows everything there is to know about dancing," Arang had told Marrah one day, and then, seeing the expression on her face, he had caught her hand and added, "Of course, I don't love him the way I love Stavan. Don't worry, Marrah; Stavan will come back to us this summer, I know he will."

  Her heart had leapt at his words, and for less time than it took to draw a breath she had been convinced that the Goddess Batal had come to Arang and told him Stavan was on his way back from the Sea of Grass; then she had come to her senses and seen he was just talking to comfort her.

  That had been well over a year ago. Now she was hoping again, even while she knew she was a fool to hope, which was why she was standing here looking at Shara instead of hurrying up the hill to see what her grandmother wanted. She was taking as long as possible, being rude, making her grandmother wait, because as long as she was on the path, she could go on telling herself that there was news waiting for her. There wasn't, of course. Perhaps there never would be, but when you loved someone as much as she loved Stavan you didn't give up easily.

  She turned away from the sight of the city and began to climb the trail, lost in thought. She knew it was selfish to brood this way when there were so many beautiful things in the world and so many people who loved her, but it was hard to face another birthday with no word from him. Time was passing. I'm getting old, she thought. She imagined herself many years from now, wrinkled and bent, her whole life wasted, tottering up to a gray-haired Stavan who didn't recognize her.