the Year the Horses came

by Mary Mackey

  She licked her lips nervously. "So here is where you stand at present. Thanks to me, they think there's a faint chance that your brother — he is your brother and not your son, yes?"

  Marrah nodded.

  "A faint chance that your brother is the legitimate son of the hero Achan. The timing isn't exactly right, but I didn't have the leisure to attend to minor details. I just talked as fast as I could and prayed to the Goddess for inspiration. Fortunately, every man in the Twenty Tribes knows Zuhan is desperate for a legitimate heir, and, even more fortunately for you, these boys are bad at numbers. Also, they think your brother's younger than I think he is. How old is he, by the way? They wouldn't let me talk to him."

  "Twelve," Marrah whispered.

  Dalish nodded. "Just as I thought. Well, they think he's ten. Luckily, he's small, and luckily everyone knows Achan went on a short trip west before he came back to announce that he was off to seek the golden tents of Han. So, as I pointed out to Slehan, Achan could have married a savage woman. Not exactly according to their ways, of course. There wouldn't have been a diviner present to slaughter the right number of horses and say the right prayers and all that, but Achan could just possibly have taken a wife, which — if it were true — would make your brother the only heir to the Great Chief. Are you following me?"

  Marrah frowned. "Not entirely."

  "Let me make it simple. In a moment I'm going to turn around and pretend to translate. If you and your brother want to be alive this time tomorrow, remember this: from now on he's Achan's son. He's ten, not twelve. Achan gave him that earring when he recognized him as his heir. As for you, you're not your brother's sister; you're his aunt. Achan had to have married a virgin, so you can't possibly be anything but an aunt. You got your bracelet from Achan too. He gave it to your sister on their wedding day, but when the poor thing died in childbirth, he took it off her arm and placed it on yours, making you the boy's seeshma — sort of a cross between a stepmother and a wetnurse — a very respectable position for a woman, in Hansi terms. Now repeat that back to me, word for word."

  Marrah did as she was told. When she was finished, Dalish nodded. "Good. Now forget everything else. What you've just said isn't a lie; it's the truth. There's no other story. You may be living with the Hansi for the rest of your life, but no matter how lonely you get or how much you're tempted to tell some sister from the south who you really are or how you really got that bracelet, don't. Not all women who once worshiped the Goddess hate these bastards as much as I do. But just to satisfy my curiosity, tell me one thing: How did your lover come by that bracelet? Did he kill Achan?"

  "No." Marrah shook her head. "He took it off his arm before he buried him. Achan was his brother." She stopped talking and looked anxiously at Dalish, who had turned deadly pale under her paints.

  "Was your lover named Stavan?" Dalish whispered so softly that her voice was less than a breath, and when Marrah indicated by a startled gesture that it was, she grabbed her by the wrist. "You must never, never tell anyone this! I wish I hadn't heard it myself. You don't know, of course, do you? There's no way you could. This lover of yours, this Stavan, came back to the Great Chief a year or two ago to tell him Achan was dead, but he acted so strange Zuhan decided he was bewitched. Changar, the diviner, read the stars and proclaimed that Zuhan was right; a beautiful witch had cast a spell on Stavan while he was in the West. Great Goddess, girl, don't you see? You're the witch! Why, they'll slice out your insides if they find out you so much as knew Zuhan's son."

  The scar-faced warrior suddenly walked up to Dalish and said something to her. He pointed to the hand that was touching Marrah's wrist, and Dalish removed it very slowly. She said something to the warrior, and then she turned to Marrah. "Slehan the shit-faced has just reprimanded me for befriending you. I have explained to him that I was moved to make such an improper gesture when I heard from your own lips that your brother was indeed the only true son of the great hero Achan. I have also told him I made a mistake when I said you were from Xori. You are actually from a little village called Shorni, rather close to my own, which makes it seem reasonable that Achan might have shared your sister's bed. Don't worry about ever running into anyone else from Shorni. No such place ever existed."

  She rose to her feet and motioned for Marrah to stand too. "I'm now about to lie to these two with such beauty and artistry that you would weep with joy if you could understand. It's my only talent, really. Perhaps if I'd grown up among my own people, I'd have been a great composer of songs." She smiled wistfully. "So Marrah of Shorni, draw that linen towel over your face and bow your head. They like a woman humble. It brings out what little good there is in them."

  She looked over at Akoah, who was still sitting where she had fallen. "As for your friend, I can't stop them from forcing sex on her, but I'll do what I can to persuade them to make her a concubine instead of a slave; that way she'll go to one man instead of the whole pack. As a concubine, she should live a good while, perhaps long enough to curse me for saving her."

  "We'll escape before they can touch her again," Marrah said fiercely. "I swear we will."

  Dalish kept on smiling but there were tears in her eyes. "My dear sister, don't you think I'd have escaped long ago if escape were possible? You don't know them yet. You can't imagine how far from home they're going to take you or how much you'll suffer. You're a woman and proud of it, but in their land women are worth less than horses, and girl children are worth nothing at all. Pray to the sweet Goddess they many you to a man who's a little less brutal than the rest. It's the best you can hope for."

  "What about you? You seem independent enough."

  "Do I?" She shook her head sadly. "I'm not. At night I lie down with Slehan the scar-faced and do whatever he orders, and when he gives me to one of his friends, as he often does, I pretend to be honored. I'm just his concubine, and if I weren't so useful his wives would have poisoned me long ago."

  Rising to her feet, she gathered her shawl around her and went to tell the warriors the story of Arang, son of Achan, and his humble aunt, Marrah.

  Not long after that, Marrah and Arang were holding each other and crying, partly with fear and partly with joy.

  "I thought you were dead," Arang whispered, as he kissed Marrah's cheeks and touched her face. The scar-faced warrior seemed disgusted at the sight of Arang's tears. He shook his head and walked off with a snort of contempt.

  Lathok, he muttered, and the brown-bearded man nodded. The word had an ugly sound.

  Arang turned to Dalish. "What did he say?"

  Dalish translated. The word meant "coward," she told him, and if he didn't want to hear it every day of his life, he should never cry again — at least not where any of the men could see him. "You're lucky they think you're just a boy." She pointed to Slehan's horse. "A man who cries sometimes ends up like that. Once that horse was a stallion, but now you'll notice it's lacking something rather important." She shot an anxious glance at the two warriors, who were sitting on a log, staring at Arang and talking to each other in low voices. "Slehan gelded it himself with his own dagger, and I think he rather enjoyed the process."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For weeks Marrah and Arang were forced to travel east on horseback as Akoah and the unfortunate women of Shambah plodded along next to them. The slave girls — for that was what the women were called now — had once been priestesses and farmers, potters and metalworkers, mothers, traders, carpenters, and hunters, but the nomads treated them with no more care than the cattle they were also driving east, and like the cattle, many died. The lucky ones died of fever; others, particularly mothers who had lost their children, died of grief; but most died of exhaustion. At night, the warriors took the survivors from campfire to campfire, forcing sex on them until they were sick with shame and lack of sleep. At dawn, the march began again, matched to the pace of horses and cattle, not human beings. The slaves were forced to keep up, and if one faltered she was beaten.

  Even those who started o
ut with good sandals and sturdy clothing were soon left with rags that offered little protection from the sun. The warriors rode from sunrise to sunset, rarely stopping until they pitched camp. When they were thirsty, they would wet their lips with a few drops from their water skins or make a small slit in the neck of one of the cows and put their lips to it, but the slaves had no water skins, and the smell of fresh blood made most of them sick.

  "For the love of the Goddess Earth, sister, give us a drink," they begged Marrah, but when she tried to lean down and offer them a sip from her water skin, the armed warrior who always rode next to her would reach out and knock it aside before it reached their lips. Dalish warned that if she went on trying to help the slaves, she might end up marching with them, but Marrah stubbornly continued and it was a tribute to how persuasive Dalish had been that she wasn't stripped and thrown down to the with the rest.

  Thanks to Dalish's lies, Marrah was the aunt of the son of a hero, and so, while the women of Shambah suffered, she was forced to sit high above them and watch. The best she could do was keep Akoah alive by making sure she was fed, clothed, and not taken around to the campfires at night, but other than that she was powerless. Imprisoned in her hot robes, she saw the world through a narrow slit in her shawl, but what she saw made her ashamed, and sometimes when the women were crying for water, she found herself wishing she too had died of fever or been killed outright like the captain of the raspa. Then she would remember how much Arang needed her, and she would force herself to sit up straight. She would grab the reins with a firm hand and try to think of some way to use the charms the priestesses of Nar had given her. She couldn't save the women of Shambah by dying with them. It was her duty to survive long enough to help them escape.

  If listening to the women's pleas for water was the worst torture, the horses themselves were a close second. Riding was an uncomfortable, bone-jarring experience that made both her and Arang seasick at first. Although the nomads sometimes used a sort of saddle made of leather, they usually clung to the bare backs of the beasts, directing them by long thongs attached to antler cheekpieces and a two-piece wooden contraption called a bit that they jammed in the animal's mouth. In theory, you were supposed to guide a horse by lightly tugging on the reins or giving it a jab in the side with your heel, but the beasts seemed to sense that Marrah and Arang had no idea what they were doing and they delighted in trying to throw them off.

  Soon Marrah got the knack of pulling hers to a stop before it could do any damage, but Arang's legs were too short to grip a horse properly, and he fell off again and again. Every time this happened, the warriors stopped and an ominous silence filled the air as they waited for him to climb back on. The look of disgust on their faces made Marrah anxious. She never forgot what Dalish had said about how Slehan had enjoyed gelding his stallion, and she was constantly afraid Arang might provoke the men to violence. There were seventy of them, all heavily armed, and Arang was too often the center of their attention. But he was young and stubborn and angry about having been called a coward, and his anger made him defiant.

  "I hate riding," he cried the second or third time he fell. "In the name of the Goddess, Marrah, let me at least get up behind you and hang on to your waist. This cursed beast they gave me is trying to kill me." He glared at his horse, which was quietly cropping grass. The nomads began to gather around him, but none dismounted.

  Dalish rode up and reined in her mare. "Get back on that horse," she said quietly. "A boy who can't ride is worthless, and one who refuses is so dishonored there's no telling what they'll do to you." She pointed to his clothes. They were luxurious by nomad standards, although any temple weaver in Shara could have turned out better: a white tunic and a pair of matted white wool leggings, soft boots, and a small gold pendant shaped like a sun. "They've dressed you like a little chief, and if you want to win their respect you have to act like one. Remember you're the son of Achan."

  "Screw Achan," Arang said. He seemed to be learning Hansi swearwords first, and it was remarkable how many of them were sexual. Dalish's eyes narrowed.

  "You're just lucky your accent is so bad they didn't understand that. Now get back on that horse, you stubborn little fool, or I'll translate what you just said. If you're going to kill yourself and your sister, I'm not going to get myself impaled along with you." Frightened by her threat, Arang pulled himself back up on his horse, and from then on, every time he fell off he kept his mouth shut.

  He always hated riding, but in time Marrah's bones stopped aching and she began to enjoy it. To her surprise, she even developed an affection for her horse, a brown mare that carried her patiently once Marrah learned to control her. Soon she was scratching the animal behind the ears and talking to her, because the beast seemed to enjoy the sound of her voice; she even gave her a name: Tarka. The word meant "freedom" in the language of the Shore People, and every time she said it, she thought of Xori, Sabalah, and the Sea of Gray Waves.

  She also thought of Stavan. The only consolation she had besides Arang's company and Dalish's kindness was the thought that she was drawing closer to him. Perhaps she might see him, but then again perhaps not. The Sea of Grass was huge, and she had no reason to think Slehan's warriors would take her anywhere near the tents of their Great Chief. Still, at night as she lay on the ground beside Arang, she imagined Stavan walking toward her through the tall grass, and sometimes when she finally got to sleep she dreamed of making love with him. But it might have been better not to dream at all; on mornings after she'd spent the night with him in her imagination, she woke feeling more lonely and discouraged than ever.

  They rode on, and as the sun grew hotter, the land seemed to surrender to it. By the end of the second week, the cool green forests were only a memory. As they passed from scattered islands of trees into the tall grass, the oaks shrunk into stunted bushes, the bushes themselves shriveled, and the Earth Herself lay down and became a featureless plain without so much as a hill to break the monotony. Actually the plain was broken by ravines and riverbeds, but you couldn't see them until you almost fell into them, and the few willows and black alders that struggled up through the sandy soil near the water were like visitors from another world. On the plain itself there were no trees at all, only tall feathered grasses that dipped and rose in green waves with every passing breeze.

  As the land leveled, the sky expanded. At midday it was a vast sheet of incandescent blue, filled with immense clouds that raced before the wind, taking on strange spiritlike shapes. At dawn and at sunset, the white hot light broke into savage reds and purples, and at night, as Marrah and Arang lay on the ground, thousands of cold, brilliant stars glittered over their heads like crystal teeth.

  It was a violent land that had spawned a violent people, and as Marrah rode under the implacable sun with a mouth as dry as straw, she began to understand how the nomads had come to worship Han. Then she would remember that this place too was part of the Goddess Earth, and no matter how harsh it seemed, it must have a purpose.

  There were even times when she was forced to admit that the steppes were every bit as beautiful as Stavan had said. During the first weeks, the colors were unsurpassed. Mixed in with the tall, drying grasses of late summer, the last flowers of the season bloomed like bits of a broken rainbow. When the wind blew and the feathered stems swayed, they danced in and out between the golden blades in a dizzying, sweet-scented swirl.

  "That one's called pheasant's eye," Dalish told her one morning, bending down from her horse to pluck a bright orange blossom, "and that yellow one over there is named sunbutter. The little pink blooms are morning stars, and the blue ones are baby's eyes." When Marrah expressed surprise, Dalish explained that among the Hansi flowers were considered women's things, which no doubt accounted for the poetry of their names.

  Another week passed, the plain grew drier, and the flowers disappeared. Soon there was no shade anywhere, not even in the ravines: only grass, dust, and flies. Sometimes rain fell in blinding sheets that left them half d
rowned, and once it hailed so hard they had to take refuge under the horses. By now there was no wood to build fires so they ate cold food, some of it so repulsive that even though Marrah was hungry she often turned away in disgust. She particularly disliked raw cow's liver, but the nomads chewed on the bloody bits as if they were a great treat. Raw mice and skinned voles also nauseated her, but sometimes she could manage to choke down a bit of uncooked bird that had been plucked and well cleaned.

  "When they're in their own camps, they cook over fires of dried dung and eat decent things like roasted mutton and cheese, plus the bulbs we women dig up and the wild grains and greens we gather," Dalish said. "But war parties like this one pride themselves on living like a wolf pack. They eat whatever's at hand, most of it raw and much of it rotten."

  Arang held his nose and made a retching noise, and Dalish chuckled. Insects were another nomad favorite, she warned him, and if one of the warriors handed him a grasshopper, he'd better not puke. "It's a great honor, and if you don't eat it, legs and all, like it was the best honey cake ever to come out of your mother's oven, you're going to be in big trouble. Besides, grasshoppers aren't so bad if they're toasted. The nomads eat them like we eat nuts. You may even get a taste for them after a while."

  They learned a lot of things from Dalish. She rode beside them day after day, teaching them Hansi, explaining the strange customs of the nomads, and warning them when they were about to do something dangerous. From Dalish they learned that in the spring the nomad women plucked wool from the molting sheep and pounded it into cloth rather than weaving it. They did have a few small looms, and sometimes they braided a little hemp or vegetable fiber to make bridles and belts, but pounded wool was what they wore year round. They had all sorts of ingenious ways of decorating this material, which they called "felt," but no matter what they did to it, felt was never as comfortable as linen.