Dragons in the Earth

by Judith Tarr

  Maybe Dorrie, too. Dorrie was a huge fan of Emma.

  I managed an actual and honestly happy grin. “Welcome aboard,” I said.

  9

  I’d noticed one horse besides Aziza whose name hadn’t shown up on the roster. I also hadn’t said anything about it. Philippe played with Bel when he played with the mares in the pasture, and he taught Emma how it worked. I presumed that was how it would be.

  Bel was or had been ridable. I’d seen his nameplate on one of the saddles in the tack room, and there was a bridle with it, along with the rest of the ensemble.

  They all had their own colors for saddle pads and leg wraps and blankets and browband bling. Aemilia was deep green. Matina was crimson. Bel was charcoal grey and silver, like a thundercloud with moonlight shining through.

  The day before Philippe and Elissa had to leave, Emma and Elissa were out with horses before I was even up to feed my crew. On the way back from the mare motel, I found Philippe in the barn with Bel.

  I’d been thinking I’d ride Aemilia first, but changed my mind abruptly. Just as I started to veer off, thinking I’d head inside and get breakfast while Philippe did whatever he was going to do with the stallion, Philippe called out to me. “Ah! Claire! Just in time.”

  I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard: I was right in front of him. Bel was being amazingly good; he stood in the crossties like a civilized being, and only pawed once, when I looked likely to keep on veering off regardless.

  He wanted me there. Philippe might be one of my bosses, but I knew who my real employers were, and this was one of them.

  I hadn’t handled him since the first day. Philippe had been leading him to and from the pasture, and he’d been busy with his mares in between. Morning feeding was part of Emma’s job. Evening feeding was a matter of tossing hay and grain into the feeder in his stall.

  That wouldn’t do, he let me know. There was the curry. He had an itch. I would be careful: he was titchier about his skin than the mares were.

  He was titchier in general. The mares could throw off sparks when they were in the mood, but he was one big crackle of energy. It would have made me nervous if I hadn’t instinctively gone into combat mode, horse-trainer style: very soft, very quiet, and very, very calm.

  I saw Philippe’s smile over Bel’s back. It took me a minute to remember how to smile back. I was focused on calming the stallion down and getting him groomed and his feet cleaned.

  He liked his saddle. It felt good, he said. His bridle, not so much, but he tolerated it because it was part of the contract. Also, it had uses, which he understood.

  When he was ready, I went to hand him off to Philippe, and Philippe was halfway down to the pasture and calling the two roan mares to come and play. Bel fixed me with a dark and expectant eye.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No, no, no. I’m not up for you.”

  Bel started toward the door. I could let him go and deal with the resulting mayhem, or I could do what he wanted, which was to take over the covered arena and get to work. Work that, he made clear, had not been happening for much too long.

  I tried to dig in my heels. “You don’t want me.”

  He didn’t even justify that with an answer. Just kept on going.

  That first ride was not an epic for the ages. He was rusty for carrying a rider, though all that ramping around the mares had kept him in reasonable shape. He fit me nicely, for as small as he was: he took up my whole leg, and he had gaits almost as big as he was on the inside. It was like riding a rocket on the constant verge of hitting escape velocity, but equally constantly making up its mind to take care of the monkey on its back.

  I kind of loved it. Him I wasn’t sure of, yet. I’m a mare person. Geldings and I get along, but my heart is given to the ladies. A stallion was completely out of my zone.

  Bel didn’t care. I was riding him. That was the arrangement. Not one I’d intentionally made, but in his egotistical little mind, when I signed on for this gig, I’d signed on for that, too.

  I got a walk and a trot out of him that day, or rather he agreed to let me try out those two gaits. He wasn’t cantering for me. I’d need a lot more balance, he said, and a whole lot less nerves.

  “Thanks,” I said, heavy on the sarcasm.

  His whole body was a shrug. This wasn’t about making me feel good about myself. When I was good enough to suit him, he’d give me more speeds. Until then, we’d walk, we’d trot, and I’d pay attention when he told me how to go about it.

  “You,” I said, “are an arrogant little bastard.”

  He totally agreed.

  I hadn’t surrendered, but I went along with it for the time being. I had myself a riding instructor, and they don’t get any better, or more merciless, than a smart horse with an attitude.

  Philippe came back to the barn while I was brushing Bel down. I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much I could say, that didn’t sound either pissy or crazy.

  I did have a question, which I asked after I’d put Bel back out with his ladies. “When’s the last time you rode him?”

  Philippe’s expression was perfectly blank. “I’ve never ridden him.”

  That pulled me up short. “You haven’t? But I thought—” I broke off. “Okay. I’ll talk to Elissa.”

  “She hasn’t, either,” he said.

  “You mean he’s never been ridden? You let me ride a horse who hasn’t even been backed?”

  “Of course he’s been backed,” Philippe said. “Our mother rode him. When she no longer could, he refused anyone else. How does the book say? He is not a tame lion. He decides who will sit on his back.”

  That was flattering. It was also downright baffling. “So why me?”

  “You’ll have to ask him,” Philippe said.

  I knew it wasn’t my great riding talent or my charming personality. “Not a tame lion,” I muttered. “Does he think he can bulldoze me into letting him schlump around however he wants? Because if that’s what he’s up to—”

  “If he wanted to be lazy,” Philippe pointed out, “he could refuse to be ridden at all.”

  “He’s doing it to tweak my chain,” I decided. “I might as well enjoy it, right?”

  “Right,” Philippe said with a straight face.

  The last day came much too fast. I knew better than to beg anybody to stay. Dorrie had left the night before: her show needed her, and she couldn’t put it off any longer. She’d be back after Christmas—I made her promise. Philippe and Elissa drove their van out first thing in the morning, after a solid round of goodbyes and a profoundly horselike lack of concern from the herd.

  “We’ll see you in Scottsdale,” Elissa said, the same as Ohana had. “We’ll send tickets.”

  I wouldn’t hold my breath, but if it did happen, I’d leap at the chance.

  That was me being cynical. Also cranky, the way I always am around goodbyes. I was glad to see them go, to get it over with. I wished I could have thrown myself in front of the van and kept them from leaving at all.

  I wasn’t alone that morning. Emma was there, and the horses had their schedule. We were both busy until well after noon.

  But then Emma left to teach her dance classes, and the quiet was enormous. All the equines were out in their pastures, dreaming the afternoon away. In my house the cats were sound asleep in a pile in the middle of my bed.

  I sat under the pepper tree the way I had the day I first met Elissa and her brother. It was significantly less hot today, but the sun was almost as fierce. The quiet had a completely different feel than it had then.

  This part of the ranch felt full. It had always had its share of spirits, in and out of the barn, with the Old One watching over them all. Now it hummed with presence.

  The horses grazed or dozed in a loose clump, in pairs and threes. Bel had staked out the west end the way he usually did, doing what Emma, in yoga mode, called holding space: standing still, looking as if he was asleep. But the way he stood, the placement of his feet, told me he was rooted i
n earth. His ears were flicking, catching every sound that wafted by.

  Nothing to see there. Just a small herd of horses in a pasture, doing what horses do.

  It was good camouflage. The question was: for what?

  10

  Caro showed up that evening, just as I was fetching the last two horses out of the pasture for the night.

  I didn’t say anything. I handed her a halter and pointed her toward Aemilia. Bel’s I kept for myself.

  Bel was smug. If he’d been Ricky I’d have hissed at him to remind him of his place in the universe, but we weren’t on those terms yet, if we ever would be.

  When everyone was eyes-deep in hay, Caro said, “Nice horses.”

  “Aren’t they.” My voice was even flatter than I’d meant it to be. “You should have come yesterday, when their owners were still here.”

  Caro shrugged. “They’ll be back.”

  While she talked, she prowled around the barn, poking in corners. I knew what she was looking for. “No wards,” I said.

  “That’s either arrogant or incredibly smart.” Caro left the hunt and came to stand with me in front of Bel’s stall. He had his round white butt to us, hunting in his feeder for the last few scraps of grain.

  “If you want to hide something really well,” she said, “you put it where it won’t draw attention. On an old ranch, maybe, that’s been inhabited for a few thousand years. That has so many spirits on it already that whatever you put there vanishes into the background noise.”

  “Not that well, if you spotted it,” I said.

  “I didn’t spot anything till I got here. Maybe I never would have, if they hadn’t hired Emma to ride horses she wouldn’t say much about, and didn’t have any pictures of. You know her motto. ‘Pictures or it didn’t happen.’ So are they stolen?” she asked. “Contraband? Infected with some dangerous disease?”

  “They’re perfectly healthy,” I said sharply, “and no, they’re not stolen. They’re family heirlooms of a sort: rare breed, last of their kind, nothing else like them in the world.”

  “Now that I believe is true,” Caro said.

  Good, because I’d made it up off the top of my head. Bel had shifted while we talked, from butt-on to broadside. He was deep in hay bliss, but he kept one ear trained on us.

  “Something must really want them,” she said. “Or really hate them.”

  My first impulse was to snap her head off. I went with the second, because I’d never known Caro to say anything she hasn’t thought through carefully first.

  “How do you figure that?” I asked.

  “Who hides a herd of horses that legitimately belongs to them? Even if they’re the utmost rarest that ever was, they’re still horses. Why conceal them like this? What’s the danger they’re hiding from?”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s paranoid.”

  “Is it?” Caro ran her finger along the edge of the stall door. She was marking it: warding.

  My hand had stopped her before my brain caught up. “Don’t,” I said.

  She frowned, but she didn’t argue. In the stall, Bel blew out sharply and shook his head till his mane flew.

  The mares had stopped eating. I could feel their attention like a hot wind on my skin.

  “I suppose somebody would want to steal them,” I said. “Obscenely wealthy horse collector. Animal-rights activist. Crazed fan.”

  “Steal or kill,” Caro said. “The level of security on these, I’d expect to find a nuclear arsenal.”

  “Governments don’t use that kind of security,” I said.

  She shot me a look. It was almost exactly the same as the one Bel was lasering at me. “I don’t think this is that small.”

  I didn’t think of myself as new to the woo. I’d been making a living at it, more or less, since grad school.

  What I hadn’t done was deeply, sincerely invest in it. Not the way Caro had. For her it wasn’t simply a way to keep the bills paid. It was her life.

  Now it had invested in me. I had a talent, which got me in trouble as often as it helped me buy groceries. I had an academic’s knowledge of Western ritual magic, a smattering of local rites and powers, and enough yoga to be fairly useless on a mat. New Age crystal-woo made me severely cranky, though I more or less understood the energy work that underlay it.

  I could call myself eclectic. I was scattered and inconsistent, and I knew just enough to realize how much I didn’t know.

  I’d been telling myself that was how I had to be. Thinking about it, putting words on it, reading books and having what Caro called a practice—like a doctor, but not the kind I was—took away from my ability to do it. I had to put all that aside and just it let it happen.

  What I really cared about was the academic world that didn’t want me, and the horses who honestly did.

  Caro didn’t push. She waited me out.

  I had to face something I’d been ducking away from since the horses arrived. The huge thing in the wind, the lightning that killed Elder Sister—they weren’t random. They were connected with the horses.

  All I had to do was keep the place safe. That was my job. Maybe I knew more about wards and guards than I did about managing stallions, but that wasn’t saying much.

  Finally I worked my way around to words. “What is it? What am I supposed to be protecting against?”

  “I don’t know,” Caro said.

  There wasn’t anything handy to pitch at her. I had to settle for shaking my fists. My tiny fists. At the sky.

  Everybody got the image, horse and human. Caro snorted. If I hadn’t been looking straight at her, I’d have thought it was one of the horses.

  “I can help you, if you let me,” she said.

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “Am I supposed to? You shouldn’t even be here.”

  “I wonder about that,” Caro said. “Will you let me help you, anyway? Just a few things that might make a difference, and can’t hurt?”

  She’d made that offer over and over since I first moved to Tucson. I kept finding reasons not to take one of her classes, or do a private session, or god forbid join the circle that met at the Women’s Side on Monday nights.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid. I didn’t want to go that deep. I talked to animals, dead as well as alive. I felt powers that lived in the earth or flew over it. That was as far as I had any intention of going.

  Bel blew warm breath on the back of my neck. I shivered, but I didn’t flinch away.

  “All right,” I said. And after a pause: “Thank you.”

  Caro nodded. She was already halfway to the door.

  That, I hadn’t expected. She’d give me a day or two at least, I’d been thinking. But she’d come prepared, and it was still barely past sundown.

  She’d brought supplies, which she added to the kit she’d given me the day I met Philippe and Elissa. She’d also brought dinner: a hamper from the Women’s Side, with a bottle of wine and a pint of twelve-dollar ice cream.

  But first, before we ate, we walked the boundaries. The whole ranch was miles bigger than we could manage on foot in the dark, but we circled the barns and the house and the pastures. Road on one side, dry river on the other. Caro chanted softly, almost too soft to hear, while I marked the borders with salt and laid down stones where Caro pointed or where I felt the need.

  Mostly they were stones from the land: fragments of tools from the old people, bits of petrified wood, a line of fossilized dinosaur teeth. I set the black tourmaline from Caro’s gift bag by the westernmost corner of the pastures, where it hummed softly to itself. I felt the Old One focus on it with something like recognition, and something like acceptance. That was well done, it gave me to know.

  The place went quiet while we walked, except for the song of the coyotes. The horses followed along inside me, the whole herd, even Aziza and Rosie. Whatever this meant to them, they approved.

  When we’d circled back to the barn, Bel called out to us. That put the seal on it. In the morning he’d walk his ow
n boundaries, and then we’d all be as safe as living things could be.

  11

  After the horses came to the ranch, my Mesopotamian dragon dream had started to change. The mudbrick walls were closer, and the dragon lay down in front of them with his snaky head on his lion’s paws.

  The night we walked the boundaries, after Caro left and I’d gone to bed in a light buzz of wine, I lay in bed, not quite asleep. Catiline was a purring ball next to my hip; William lay like a lead-lined pillow over my feet. Roswitha was off somewhere in the house, hunting shadows by herself.

  Years ago, when I first moved to the ranch, I’d learned how to feel the streams that run under the ground. Water, obviously, but energy, too: earth’s nerves, I call those. Tucson is as thick with both as a body is with veins and neurons.

  If there was a brain, or a nerve ganglion, anywhere in the valley, it was the ranch. That’s what had drawn humans to it for so long. And that, I thought tonight, was why the horses had been brought there. The streams nourished them, and hid them. I still didn’t know what they were hiding from.

  I couldn’t ask Elissa or Ohana. Not by phone or email. The same down-deep voice that had told me to let Caro ward the ranch made me not want to put anything about this in the air or over the internet.

  I slid down along the streams of water and energy, from half-waking into full dream. There it was: the marsh, the mud-brown walls. But this time I was inside them, and there was no sign of the dragon.

  When I’m not dreaming about dragons, most of my dreams are crashingly mundane. I’ll spend the whole night sweeping the floor or worrying about laundry. All the crazy things happen when I’m awake.

  I suppose this one was mundane, if the everyday world was a mudbrick city beside a wide shallow river. I was shorter and squatter and browner, and instead of flyaway brown hair, I had a mane of black curls with a thread of silver here and there.