by Judith Tarr
That was a guardian, too. It watched us go by, a faint cool touch like a finger of wind.
The courtyard opened into a gift shop and a row of concessions—a psychic shock which I should have been prepared for. I kicked myself into real-world mode and aimed for the ticket desk.
The person womanning it wasn’t anyone I knew. She looked bored; messed with her tablet screen for a while; rummaged around under the table till she came out with an envelope. Tickets to the performance; tickets for backstage after. Two of the big, expensive programs. No note. Nothing personal.
I don’t know why I’d thought there might be. This was like a deep-cover operation. All it was missing was a line across the bottom of the tickets: “Will self-destruct in five seconds.”
They stayed perfectly solid in their envelope. Caro had gone to buy tea and postcards. I’d normally have done the same, but I was so twitchy my skin wanted to crawl off.
I paused by a display of t-shirts and worked on breathing. Deep and slow. The way I did before I had a conversation with a client, or a ride on a difficult horse.
When I was something resembling calm, Caro handed me a cup of iced tea, no sugar, slice of lemon. The interior door opened in front of us.
It was like a descent into an ancient Mystery: from light into whispering dark. I smelled dust and canvas and pine shavings, and a faint hint of horse.
We found our seats halfway up in the middle: close enough to see details of the stage, but far enough away to take in the whole sweep from one wing to the other. Caro bumped me with her shoulder: woo solidarity. I bumped her back, and paged through the program.
The horses I didn’t know except from lore and legend, but I recognized Philippe and Elissa and half the crew. Even Ohana: she was in a backstage shot, grooming one of Philippe’s stallions.
I closed my eyes. People moved and rustled around me. There were horses outside. They had the kind of filters horses learned to put up when they lived in public, like show horses but with less grinding tension.
They felt happy to me, the way horses do when they have a job that they like and understand. They knew what they were supposed to do and how, and they were looking forward to showing it off.
I smiled. I’d had good hopes for the show, just from knowing the people involved, but I was glad to get corroboration from the horses. I could relax—mostly—and enjoy, without worrying that I’d be subjected to the horses’ pain.
Well, no, I don’t go to horse shows. Would you, if you could hear them crying for help, and feel what they feel?
Deep breath. This wasn’t that kind of place, or that kind of show. Caro was quiet beside me, breathing her own spectrum of calm.
Caro does people the way I do animals. “This whole place,” she said. “It’s designed to put you in a zen state.”
“Like a cave of the Mysteries,” I said.
She shivered a bit, even while she nodded. “These people are good.”
“Scary good?”
“We’ll see.”
“I hate it when you sound like my mom.”
She grinned at me. I razzberried back.
16
The show had its own magic. Not the woo, exactly. Most of it was lights and music and stagecraft, and horses being horses, with humans and without.
Just seeing them be themselves on a stage in front of an audience was a kind of miracle. I let all my worries and suspicions and questions fade away.
They’d come back, and fast, when the show was over. But for those three hours with intermission, I existed outside the world.
It was a little like my Mesopotamian dreams, and a lot like my days on the ranch. Emma called it “being with.” Just existing; letting things be.
Toward the end, after Philippe’s ode to joy with his stallions, and Elissa’s exquisite performances, I half-woke to what had to be a message for me. It was another dance, this time with two stallions. Philippe danced with his at liberty. Elissa danced with hers under saddle, each step carefully measured but somehow perfectly free. It was a choice he made, to do as she asked—the same way Philippe did as his stallion asked.
No one was master and no one was beast of burden. They were equals.
Could a human be the equal of an ancient god? Let alone six goddesses?
That was a question I meant to ask.
Ohana found us as soon as the lights came back up after the show. I’d just started to fish in my bag for the backstage passes.
“Won’t need those,” she said. “I’m your pass.”
She and Caro sized one another up. Caro doesn’t give much away even if you know her, but I thought she approved of Ohana. I suspected Ohana felt the same way.
I like it when my people like each other. My stomach was starting to clench again, but I did my best to keep breathing. As many questions as I wanted to ask, and as nervous as I was about the answers, I could pretend for a while longer that we were just visiting and this was just a Sunday afternoon’s entertainment.
Backstage was busy, people and animals everywhere, crew and performers pitching in together. What surprised me was how calm it all was. There was a deep quiet underneath.
That was how they did it. They gave the horses peace, and the horses could live this wandering life as if they were in old familiar pastures.
These were lovely horses, and some were more than lovely. Philippe’s stallions made my breath catch. All six had their own tent, and were free inside it, though I could see the ropes and posts along one end where they’d be tied for grooming or feeding.
They came when Ohana brought us in, curious to see who we were, and wondering politely if any of us had something sweet to eat. Ohana did, and she let Caro and me share.
Those soft noses and big eyes and flowing manes were a horsegirl’s dream. They were gentle—not like Bel at all. Standing in the middle of them was like drifting through clouds. With him, every move tempted the lightning.
I was sorry to leave them, but I had the rest to meet, and their humans, too. Philippe and Elissa last of all, fresh out of makeup and costume. They swept me out so fast I was dizzy. I barely had time to say Adio to Ohana.
Elissa’s home on the road was a vintage Airstream with the original fittings and the wear to show for it.
It could have been horrible, but it reveled in its funkiness. She’d put her own touch on it, bits of color and brightness, and a whole glass case of little horses like the one who traveled in my pocket.
They were all styles and all apparent periods and all different materials: wood, stone, bronze, iron, lovingly polished silver and even clear bright gold. Some looked Japanese or Chinese, some were Etruscan or archaic Greek or ancient Egyptian. Anywhere that horses came from, Elissa had a remembrance of it.
There’s a running joke that anything an archaeologist can’t figure out a use for, she labels it a ritual object. I wouldn’t say these had a specifically sacred purpose, but they had meaning. They were a tribute to the gods of horses.
They were also another set of guardians. Everything here was warded and protected and guarded till it should have felt as psychically null as the hotel. What I felt instead was the same deep calm I’d felt backstage, and something else.
I tripped over my feet trying to walk and trace the energies. Caro caught me before I faceplanted in the display case.
I had to pull myself out of it, but first I had to know what was rumbling underneath. I made it to the banquette, while Elissa put the kettle on for tea. Philippe was still with the horses; he’d be there in a few minutes.
Normally I’d have been gnawing on all the questions I’d been accumulating since Thanksgiving night, trying to decide which one to ask first. That thing I was feeling now drove them all out of my head.
“What’s after you?” I asked. “What needs this much protection?”
“When we’ve had tea,” Elissa said, “we’ll show you.”
I opened my mouth, but then I shut it again. This was going to happen at their pace. There w
asn’t much I could do but drink my tea and nibble my way around a plate of biscuits and watch the light fade in the big window at the end of the trailer.
When I’m preoccupied with the woo, I don’t have enough spare words to carry on a casual conversation. Caro goes the opposite way: she flips into hostess mode and kills it with the small talk. She got more out of Philippe and Elissa in half an hour than I had in a week.
“Oh yes,” Elissa said, “we grew up in France, but our family comes from farther east. Some of us from the Arabian peninsula; some from central Asia, down the trade routes into Phoenicia.”
Caro’s brows went up. “That’s a long way back.”
“Memories are longer on that side of the ocean,” Philippe said. “Families grow and branch and change, but some trace the line for centuries. Even millennia.”
Caro nodded. “It’s the same in some of the tribes here. My father told stories from the people who were before, and the people before them. Not all died or moved away; some stayed when the new people came in.”
“Yes,” Elissa said. “They stayed in our part of the world, too. And passed on their blood and their stories.”
“And their horses?”
I didn’t necessarily mean to say it, but it felt as if it had to be said.
Philippe didn’t blink. “The training, certainly. Sometimes the breeding. In Arabia, the lines go back to the Prophet.”
“And that’s just for convenience,” Elissa said. “Or politics. Look at the genetics and you see consistency for thousands of years.”
“Could be wild herds, small populations, limited genetic material,” said Caro.
“Or could be humans with their meddling,” Elissa said, “at least for the past few millennia.”
“Could be,” Caro allowed.
I had other thoughts. I chewed them over while the conversation ran on through the Greek Islands and the citadel of Tyre, having dropped the horses somewhere along the way.
The thing underneath that I couldn’t quite sense was very much here and in, or under, this place. I had a feeling it couldn’t quite sense me, either, or the people with me, but it wanted badly to find them. And that might not be a good thing.
When my mind decided to get metaphorical, it gave me a dark ocean and a shimmer of scales, and an endless curve that might be a tail. Because if it was a fin, it was bigger than anything that had ever swum in any earthly ocean.
As big as a cosmic dragon?
The woo teaches us to be sensible, but not go overboard with the skepticism. If something looks likely, it probably is, no matter how impossible non-woo culture wants it to be.
I’d been happier before I knew how much there really is to the universe. Parts of it are bloody scary. Parts don’t just want you dead. They want worse. Much worse.
The quiet back-and-forth of conversation had stopped. Philippe was gathering up cups and plates.
Caro had her kit out and was turning over stones and crystals. I thought she might pick out one of the strong protective stones, like my own black tourmaline, but she swept them all together and dumped them back in their bag. “This is bigger than any of us,” she said.
“You have no idea,” I said. I turned to face Elissa. “Do you care to tell me why I seem to be entertaining an avatar of an ancient Mesopotamian god in my landlady’s front pasture?”
“Not an,” said Elissa without even a blink. “The. That’s the gentleman himself.”
“I wouldn’t call him a gentleman,” I muttered. Though to be fair, he had been perfectly polite.
“We said we’d show you,” Elissa said. She stood up and headed for the door.
17
They drove us into the desert, past my truck all alone in the empty parking lot and out through the bladed, denuded moonscape of yet another future fancy development. The land’s soul was dead there, but the farther we went, the more life it had.
I always feel as if I’m in sensory deprivation around Phoenix, and I’m relieved to get back to living country. This time the relief was so sharp it felt like pain.
It was the company I was with. Caro drummed silently on her thighs, beating out a rhythm that was old when these hills were young. Philippe and Elissa peered ahead into the night with the same clear focus I’d seen in their performances, as if the desert were a herd of horses they meant to win over.
I’ve lived in this country for long enough that I tend to forget how it strikes people who are new to it. Especially people with the ability to see beyond the sand and the heat and the cacti.
It’s not a country you tame. You can blade it into submission, and suck the soul out of it till there’s nothing left but toxic dust, but it does not domesticate.
These people from well to the east of France understood the basics, but it was an alien place for them. I couldn’t tell if they’d ever learn to see it as home, or if it mattered whether they did.
On the edge of the dead country, they turned down a bleak frontage road. I could see the moving lights of one of the highways up the hill. Down here the emptiness gave way to a new wasteland of strip malls and office parks and industrial compounds with high-tech names. The numbing sameness of chain stores and fast-food restaurants tried to make itself festive with lights and tinsel, reminding me that we were deep in the throes of Consumermas.
I do like the lights. Even in the dead land. They’re warm, and they drive back the dark.
I’d been expecting to be taken to some back road off a back road and treated to a show like the one in the tent, part documentary, part diorama. The Lost History of the Great God Marduk and His Court of Excessively Patient Ladies.
What I got was an office park and a structure of glass and light. TMA Global, the sign said. The logo was so chicly abstract it was almost impossible to tell what it was supposed to be. A curving shape, drawn in lines that suggested just enough to make their intentions clear. Snake? Wings?
Dragon, maybe. Curled around a very stylized planet, with a hint of the ouroboros: the worm that biteth his own tail.
Somebody had a clever ad agency.
“There’s the enemy,” Elissa said as she drove around the building. Her tone was casual, but the energy underneath made my skin shiver.
“Seriously?” I asked, though I knew she was as serious as death.
She nodded. Philip, in the back seat, had drawn up tight. Caro was perfectly quiet.
We drove on past, through a strip mall that was mostly offices. The knot of cars at the end congregated around a restaurant I’d heard of down in Tucson. It had a Michelin star.
We had a reservation, and a back room with a door and an air of remarkable quiet. It felt like the Cirque: warded so securely that nothing could get in unless it was invited.
“Hiding in plain sight?” I asked after the very discreet server had left us with drinks and the first of a steady stream of edible treasures—no menus here, we were eating what Chef made for us.
I nibbled my way around the plate of appetizers while Elissa took her time answering. It was Arizona food that had died and gone to heaven: chiles rellenos, taquitos and flautas stuffed with exquisitely spiced minces of goat and chicken and fish, tiny tamales barely big enough for the olive in the heart. If I hadn’t been here for entirely other reasons, I’d have given myself up to the happy food coma.
This wasn’t actually about the food, so I nibbled. Philippe was eating hungrily, I noticed, but Elissa picked at her plate. Caro had tucked away a chile relleno and a tamale and was waiting quietly in a way I should learn to imitate.
I’m not a quiet person. I’m not patient, either. I’d waited this long, I was done. “Did you think I’d go on thinking I was just boarding a herd of rare-breed horses?”
That Elissa would answer. “No,” she said. “We hoped, because it would be safer for you, but they didn’t agree. We could only persuade them to let you be in peace for a little while.”
“The mares, you mean,” I said. “He didn’t agree. Did he?”
She
frowned at me. “He doesn’t remember. The Ladies, yes, of course, but—”
“How do you think I figured it out?”
She sat back. Philippe was watching, I noticed, without nearly the same level of shock. He’d guessed. Or hoped.
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Elissa said after a stretching minute. “What did he do? He’s still there, we’d know if he wasn’t. What—”
“Nothing violent,” I said. “The moon called him out, I think. Or time getting ripe enough to loosen the fur suit. He went right back in it. He’s used to it, after all. After all these years.”
“The moon.” Elissa stared at the plate of crumbs and remnants as if she’d never seen anything like it before. “Or the dragon who ate it?”
“How could—” I stopped. This was magic. Or theology. Either way, they weren’t exactly founded in logic or causality. A dragon could eat the moon, and it could still be here. Though if she ate the earth, would that also be true?
“I think you’d better tell us a story,” Caro said.
When Caro is that calm and quiet, people snap to attention. Elissa had more strength of will than that, but she nodded as if conceding a point.
“A very long time ago,” she said, “when the gods were still deciding who ruled which realm and what each should be worshipped for, a winged god and a cosmic Dragon should have divided up the earth between them. But he didn’t like to see it gnawed on like a ripe apple, and she didn’t like to share. They fought, and he drove her so far out that some say she fell into the next universe.”
I knew that story. I’d dreamed it, or a version of it. Stories that old and that powerful always have versions. No two are ever alike.
Elissa went on past where my dreams kept ending. That part made me lean forward. I had to remember to breathe.
“That should have been the end of it. The earth was free of her, and he settled in to be a god of storms and the fork-tongued earth-dragon and, eventually, the horse. But she still had her worshippers, and some of them were not the submissive sort. They found new ways to devour the earth and the creatures that lived on it, and they never forgot who had thrown their lady down and flung her into the void.
