“You’ve been here since you got here.”
“No—I mean, it feels like a long time. And like a short time. And somehow the light doesn’t change …”
“That’s why I like canyons,” she said. “Dusk feels like forever. Dawn too.”
He nodded again. “Things take as long as they take. They last as long as they last. Horse time.”
Her doe eye twinkled at him. “I like my apple better.”
“I guess I do too.” Again he went to rise, and again the weight surpassed his strength. “Seems like I walked a long way to get here. A really long way.”
“Three or four days, probably. Unless you walk very fast.”
“No, I mean like … like twenty-five years. More. My whole life.”
“When did I go literal and you metaphoric? Aren’t we supposed to work the other way around?”
“Now you’re teasing me.”
“Only a little.” She smiled fondly. “Myself a little too.”
Sometime later, he stirred himself to speak again.
“I just wish …” He shook his head. “I wish we could have met a long time ago. Then maybe everything would be different.”
“We did meet a long time ago,” she said, “and everything is different.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“But it is. You just don’t know it yet.”
He looked pained. “None of that, huh? No more gnomic epigrams.”
“Gnomic epigrams!” She laughed delightedly. “Oh, I like that.”
“Stop. No games, all right? This is serious.”
“Come at this with solemn resolve and it will eat you alive. Forever. And its teeth aren’t even sharp.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Powers have been loosed upon the world who make the future more frantic than a lunatic’s nightmare, and make the past less than words you might write with your finger on the surface of this river.”
“Um, actually …” He frowned. “Yeah, actually that’s pretty much it. How do you know about this?”
“There are ways in which I’m very like a mortal woman,” she said. “There are ways in which I’m more like a horse. Horses never forget. They can’t. Teach a colt a trick and forty years later the aged gelding he’s become will know that trick without reminder. Every smile, every frown, every caress. Every slap. Every whipping. Always there. Always. That’s how I am. I remember. I remember more than even horses. I remember things that didn’t happen.”
“You remember—?”
“The past is in motion. In these days, nothing is certain. Anything can change. This moment itself may evaporate like a dewdrop in summer sun. But I remember what is lost when the world is changed.”
“That’s a … um, interesting power.”
“It’s not power. Only memory. I mention it because you should know some things don’t change.”
“Really?” The more he thought about that, the more important it sounded. “Because you’ve lived—”
“Mostly forever,” she said lightly. “I have been to interesting places, and seen exotic things. Witnessed events small and events vast. Some of which are still real.”
“I guess it’s those still-real ones I should know about.”
“Most things that don’t change are inconsequential; they mean so little to the wider world that no god can be bothered to change them. Then there are others that have stood so eternally themselves, I believe they can’t be changed.”
“Tell me.”
“I have seen a man-god with a sword strike the hand from an arm of a god-man. I have seen a man-god with a sword drive a thousand thousand gods into a crack in the universe. I have seen a man throw himself upon a sword to slay his dearest enemy and save his bitterest love. I have seen a sword slay a goddess, transubstantiate a god, and bring forth upon this guilty world an empire of immortal justice.”
“Um …” He frowned, swallowed, coughed, and started again. “A couple of those, I was there.”
“I saw you.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You seemed a little distracted.”
“Did we—did I ever meet you before—wait. Here. Did I ever meet someone who wasn’t you yet? Someone who wasn’t the horse-witch?”
“Why?” Something dark and wary in her tone caught him and turned him toward her. She had drawn back from the fire, and the twilight had thickened enough to shadow her face. “What can the answer to that question mean to you?”
“A woman in Faltane. A slave at the manor. She died in the fire.”
“That didn’t happen. You didn’t meet her.”
“I know. Please. You remember?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about her.”
“I would prefer not.”
He nodded. “I won’t try to make you.”
“It’s a dark tale,” she said. “A perilous road, one that will take you somewhere you may not like.”
“Pretty much the same as any road.”
She sighed. “Yes.”
“I can’t think of a road I’ve walked that isn’t perilous.”
She said, “She is gone, and no one remembers her except me. This will take a woman and make her into a story. There was more to her, more in her, than can be told. She deserves a better story than I can give her.”
“Most people do,” he said. “Start with her name.”
“Slaves don’t have names. She was called by whatever word pleased her master that day.”
“Oh. It’s that kind of story.”
“Of slavery, yes. But mainly: rape.”
He looked down. Rape was a hard word. Harder when it’s someone he knew. And cared about. The sick twist in his guts booted denial right the fuck out of his head.
Maybe if he kept his eyes on the ground he could stand here and take it.
“No,” she said. “You’re not allowed to look away. Not from this story. If you want to know this, you have to take it face-to-face.”
“I have to know.”
“And I’m sorry for that.”
“Me too.” He lifted his head and made himself gaze square into the distant gleam of eyes within the shadows of her face. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Then listen,” she said. “This is her story. It’s the only one she gets.”
“Her first master was a man who may have been her father, or may have bought her from her family, or stolen her. He may have found her in a wood; it was not uncommon, in the land of her birth, for impoverished families to expose and abandon infants they could not afford to feed. Some things can’t be known. What is known is that her earliest memory was of rape.”
“Jesus.”
“Is that a name or a curse?”
“Both.”
She nodded. “All right.”
After a bit, she went on.
“It is known that this man used her as another man might use a handkerchief: a receptacle for his casual lust. When she could, she would run. When she was caught, she would be whipped.
“When she had grown sufficiently tall that his attentions were diverted by younger children, her master sold her to a whorehouse in a neighboring town. There, being still young and slender, she was taught how to feign virginity. Not virginity as it is, but virginity as lustful men dream it might be—virginity of the sort for which these men were willing to pay a great deal. She lost her maidenhead several times a day for some years.
“When she grew into womanhood, she became instead a young wife whose husband was off in the war—whatever war was handy—selling her body to pay rent on the farm they tilled, and to provide for her little daughter, or her little son. Sometimes both. Who were also available, for the right price.
“She was never given money of her own, of course, nor were the dozens of girls who were occasionally her daughter, or the boys who were occasionally her son; their reward for their labor was scant food and barely enough rest that they might continue the next day. She did
not have friends there. Very few of the children lived more than a few weeks. Very few of the slaves lived more than a year.”
Her face showed only dispassion, but still it hurt him to look at her. “How could you—she—live through that? How could anybody?”
“Some things cannot be known,” the horse-witch repeated severely. “As a child, she survived by feats of imagination, spinning endlessly romantic dreams about other lives—of adventure, drama, of exotic places and exotic creatures, and she dreamed at first that the dream was her real life, and her real life was only nightmare. When she could maintain that fantasy no longer, she fancied instead that in some other life she must have been wicked. Greatly wicked. An avatar of evil power, transforming the life she was forced to live from unreasoning horror into a just and reasonable punishment for crimes she could not remember, and only barely imagine.
“She turned to this latter fancy after one of her attempts to escape, when she was perhaps nine years old. She had reached a temple to the local goddess of harvest, and had thrown herself on the mercy of the priestesses. She told them of the life she had fled, and begged to be allowed to sweep their floors, muck out their kitchens, anything at all that might keep her safe from rape and the whip. The priestesses took her in, bathed and fed and clothed her, and then returned her to her master.
“They were the first to tell her what she would hear again and again, from priests, wise women, holy hermits, sacerdotes and hieresiarchs and everyone else who claimed to know or work the will of the gods. They told her everything happens for a reason. They told her the gods work in mysterious ways. They told her she wouldn’t be a slave unless that was the fate the gods had decreed for her. The gods had made her a slave, and their will was not to be questioned. Those were the words they used.
“What those words meant was this: The gods decided she should be raped. Should be whipped. Should starve and live in pain and covered in scabs. Every day it was ordained she should scream to the gods for mercy. That never came. That would never come.
“Some said that the endless horror she suffered was punishment for crimes she had committed in some forgotten previous existence. Others said her endless horror was purifying some invisible part of her so that she might have ease and station in an imaginary existence after her death. Some even told her that she was being punished for someone else’s crime—that an unknowable ancestor had burdened her with an inheritance of evil.
“Sometimes the godfolk did try to help her, but they were few and weak; their only power was condemnation and moral outrage. Her masters, who profited by the continual rape of her and of those like her, were many and strong; if they had been the sort of people to be moved by moral outrage, they would never have become merchants of rape.
“This was how she passed her childhood and her young womanhood. In the fullness of time, privation and horror took from her the power to seem a young wife, and so she was given over to the men who enjoy pain. Receiving pain, but more often inflicting pain.
“This was when she discovered it was possible to enjoy her work.
“She learned many ways to hurt men, and many ways to survive being hurt by them. She developed a reputation for ingenuity, as well as durability. She could take a considerable beating, and could inflict a very credible beating even on a man much larger than herself. She healed quickly, and she never lost her enthusiasm for hurting the whorehouse’s clientele. She became sought after, requested, well regarded by her fellow slaves, and even pampered with small privileges from her masters and their guards; somehow this made her even more unhappy. She had been punished for being bad. Did being rewarded mean she was now good?
“If a horse can’t make a connection between good behavior and reward, bad behavior and punishment, this can break their mind. Horses need stories even more than people do; this causes that, something else causes the other thing. Simple stories, but they need them. Something like that may have happened to her: her mind may have broken. Or perhaps being valued had somehow given her the notion that she had value. This is another thing that cannot be known.
“What is known is that during an otherwise routine exercise in sexual humiliation, she took up the instruments of pain and killed several men. She crippled, maimed, or disfigured several more, and she ran.
“She had run before, and had been always caught and whipped for it—but she was older now, more wily, and she had well-honed skills of both deception and violence, but most of all she believed that she deserved to get away. This may have made the difference.
“She moved by night, and hid during the day. Sometimes she hid in outlying barns, or in tall grass of hay meadows, and in these places she first met horses. They feared her, because she was strange, and human, and stank of blood and desperation. But though they feared her, they did not despise her; they had not been taught that some humans are to be worshipped, while others are vermin to be destroyed, or objects to be used and discarded. She found, across the months of her flight, that to approach horses with kindness made them approachable, and that horses receive gifts with gratitude and give affection in return.
“She found someone she could love who would love her back.
“Weeks and months went by, and in time she was recaptured, of course. Slavery was blazoned in the whip scars on her back. But now she was far from the lands of her former masters, and she had skills more useful than submission to men’s lust. In Faltane County, she became a stablehand, which to her was a gift of the mercy she had never received for all her prayers; to shovel horse shit all day was to her a blessing of peace. Later she became a groom, permitted now to handle her master’s mounts, and later still a retrainer of horses damaged by the ignorant brutality of their masters.
“Soon her reputation reached the ears of the Faltane himself. The Faltane was a bad rider, and a bad man. It is known that once when he was riding to hounds, his horse stumbled and nearly pitched him from the saddle. He dismounted, had his footmen untack the horse, then drew his sword, slashed the horse through its belly, and left it in the field to die.
“He had ruined many horses, and scarred many more, and when he heard of a slave woman skilled with damaged horses, he let it be known that he desired her service. She was given to him as a gift. And thus was her life for some years, until the Faltane looked around his lands and saw those of his neighbors, and he looked upon those lands with lust. He hired mercenaries of tremendous power, who drove the Faltane’s neighbors before them like deer before a wildfire.”
“And that’s where I came in.”
“You didn’t. You were never there.”
“That’s why I started asking you about this stuff. Because I was there.”
“You weren’t. With the mercenaries came a man who looked like you, and who spoke with a voice like yours, and who may have behaved, in some ways, as you might. This man was not you.
“He was a sad man, a tired man, a man whose youth was horror and whose maturity was worse. He was broken in ways impossible to describe. He was scarred deeper than his face and form could reveal, and many of his scars were from his own hand. Perhaps it was his damage that called to her, or hers to him. This too cannot be known.
“What is known is that he and she spoke together from time to time, and some of what they spoke of was how each of them had been hurt. Not much, but little needed saying. He felt bad for her. She felt bad for him. Speaking together awakened pain, but silence would have been worse. Soon she came to understand that he was her friend, and she was his friend, and this was a curiosity to her, as she’d never had a friend who was human, much less a man.
“When he did not have killing to do in the Faltane’s service, he would come and watch her work the horses. He brought meals down to the stables and shared them with her. At the last of these shared meals, he asked what she might do if she could leave Faltane. What she might do if she were free.
“She told him she could never be free. Her life had become her master, and her past was its whip. He said he und
erstood, and that free was a made-up word, one that didn’t really mean what it is supposed to mean, and he apologized for using it.
“He wanted to know, he said, if he asked her, would she come away with him? He said his daughter had many horses, and none of the men who trained them were as good as she was, and she would have her own cottage and her own garden, even her own horses, and she would be paid for her work, in real gold, and she began to weep.
“She said he was almost as kind as a horse, but no kindness could take her from there. The horses in the manor stable were her only friends other than him—and worse, she was their only human friend at all. She could never abandon them to torturers.
“He asked then, what if all the horses could come with them? and she said that the world does not work in such ways, and he said Fuck the world. Just say yes and we will make this happen.
“But he was wrong about the world, and she was right. Before she could answer, the stable was on fire. The mercenaries had turned their hand against the Faltane, and their leader could with a glance strike fire hot enough to ignite stone.
“The man told the slave to free the horses, and he raced away to fight whatever battle he might have thought important. She did what she could, but horses panic in fires, and when frightened, a horse will return to its stall; many must be led from their stalls individually and the stalls closed behind them. Then there were men with armor and swords who wanted to take the horses she had freed and ride them into battle. She killed some of these men, and the others ran away.
“The man who was her friend returned to bring her away from the fire, for now all the manor was ablaze, and he said that soon there might be no escape. He took her knife, and he held her even though she fought against him, and would have carried her away. But horses—”
For the first time, the horse-witch’s voice broke, and for a time she could not speak. When she could, she went on.
“But horses were screaming. And some of the horses she had freed were screaming in reply, screaming to their beloved companions trapped in the fire, and she told her friend that she could not leave them to die in agony and terror. He held her and he spoke to her, and when he saw she understood, he let her go, and came into the burning stable at her side.”
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