Horses!

by Gardner Dozois

  "Surely," she said, "if they can take Latin, they can read English?"

  She sounded properly shocked. I laughed sourly. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? But we're egalitarian at Jonathan Small. Anyone who wants anything can take it. Can't be elitist, now, can we? Though I finally got them to give me a remedial Latin class—remedial reading, for kids who can't read English. It does work. And it keeps them from going nuts in a regular class."

  "Democracy," said Mrs. Tiffney, "was never intended for everyone."

  I couldn't help it. I laughed. I couldn't stop. When I finally did manage to suck in a breath, she was watching me patiently. She didn't look offended. She didn't say anything further, either, except to ask me to turn around and put the team into a trot.

  When we'd cooled the horses and cleaned the harness—she insisted on doing it herself, no matter what anyone said—she invited me to the house. I almost refused. I'm shy about things like that, and I had classes in the morning. But maybe I had amends to make. I shouldn't have laughed at her.

  From the outside it was nothing in particular. A big white farm house with pillars in front: New England Neoclassical. Janna had the upstairs rear, which I'd seen already, steep twisty staircases and rooms with interesting ceilings, dipping and swooping at the roof's whim, and a fireplace that worked.

  Downstairs was much the same, but the ceilings were halfway to the sky, rimmed with ornate moldings, and there seemed to be a fireplace in every room, even the kitchen. There were books everywhere, on shelves to the ceiling, on revolving shelves beside the big comfortable chairs, between bookends on tables and mantelpieces. And in through the books there were wonderful things: a bust of a Roman senator, a medieval triptych of angels and saints around a Madonna and child, an African mask, a Greek krater, a bronze horse that must have been Greek, too, and hanging from the ceiling, so surprising that I laughed, a papier-maché pterodactyl with carefully painted-in silvery-gray fur.

  Mrs. Tiffney wasn't going to let me help her with the cups and cookies, but she didn't try too hard to stop me. She did insist that I get comfortable in the living room while she waited for the water to boil. I wandered where she pointed, past the den and the library I'd already seen, to the front room with its wide windows and its Oriental carpet. It was full of books as all the other rooms were, and its fireplace was marble, cream-pale in the light from the tall windows. There was a painting over it, an odd one, perfectly round, with what must have been hundreds of figures in concentric circles.

  When I came closer I saw that it wasn't a painting, precisely. More of a bas-relief, with a rim that must have been gold leaf, and inside it a rim of beautiful blue shading to green and gray and white, sea-colors, and in the center a field of stars—I picked out the gold dots of constellations, Orion and the Dipper, and the moon in silver phases—and between them more people than I could begin to count, doing more things than a glance could take in. They had a classical look, neoclassical more probably, not quite elaborate enough to be baroque, not quite off-center enough to be medieval.

  I found my finger creeping up to touch, to see if it was really real. I shoved my hand in the pocket of my jacket.

  A kettle shrieked in the kitchen. I almost bolted toward it. Hating to leave that wonderful thing, but glad to escape the temptation to touch it.

  "Did you know," I said to Mrs. Tiffney as she filled the teapot, "that you have the shield of Achilles in your living room?"

  She didn't look at me oddly. Just smiled. "Yes," she said. "I thought you'd recognize it."

  I picked up the tray before she could do it, and carried it back through the rooms. The shield—yes, it was a shield, or meant to be one, clearly and, now that I noticed, rather markedly convex—glowed at me while Mrs. Tiffney poured tea and I ate cookies. I don't remember what the cookies tasted like. They were good, I suppose. I was counting circles. There was the city at peace, yes. And the city at war. The wedding and the battle. The trial, the ambush. The field and the vineyard. The cattle and the lions. The sheep and the shepherds. The dancing floor and the dancers.

  "Someone," I said, "made himself a masterpiece."

  Mrs. Tiffney nodded. She was still smiling, sipping tea, looking sometimes at me and sometimes at the marvel over her mantel.

  "People argue," I said. "Over how it really was supposed to be. Your artist went for the simplest way out—the circles." "Sometimes simplest is best," Mrs. Tiffney said.

  I nodded. The cattle were gold, I noticed, with a patina that made them look like real animals, and their horns looked like tin, or something else grayish-silvery. Base metal, probably, gilded or foiled over. Whoever this artist was, whenever he worked—I was almost ready to say seventeenth century, or very good twentieth with a very large budget—he knew his Homer. Loved him, to do every detail, wrinkles of snarls on the lion's muzzles, curls of hair on the bulls' foreheads, bright red flashes of blood where the lions had struck.

  "This should be in a museum," I said.

  Mrs. Tiffney didn't frown, but her smile was gone. "I suppose it should. But I'm selfish. I think it's happier here, where people live, and can touch it if they want to, and it can know the air and the light."

  Pure heresy, of course. A wonder like this should have the best protection money could buy, controlled climate, controlled access, everything and anything to preserve it for the ages.

  But it was beautiful up there in this living room, with late daylight on it and a bit of breeze blowing through. I got up without thinking and went over to it, and touched it. The figures were cool, raised so that I could have seen them without eyes, and they wove and flowed around one another, a long undulating line that came back to where it began.

  I wasn't breathing. I drew a breath in slowly. "I've never," I said, "seen a thing like this. Or anything that came close to it." "There's only one like it in the world," Mrs. Tiffney said.

  She bent forward to fill my cup again. I sat back down, took another cookie.

  "And you say you don't believe in democracy," I said. "If keeping this out of a museum isn't democratic, then what is?"

  "This is simple sense, and giving a masterpiece the setting it loves best." She sipped delicately from the little china cup. "It's been in my family for a very long time. When it first came to us, we promised its maker that we would care for it as he asked us to do, never to hide it away and never to sell it, or to give it except as a gift to one who could love it as he loved it. It was the eldest daughter's dowry, when such things were done. Now I'm the last," she said, "and it goes to no daughter after me."

  I was still wrapped up in the wonder of the thing, or I would never have said what came into my head. "Janna says you have daughters. Two of them. And granddaughters."

  "Stepdaughters," she said. She didn't seem offended. "I was my husband's second wife. We had a son, but he died early, and he had no children. My husband's children were never quite sure what to make of me. Now that I'm old, you see, I'm permitted to be eccentric. But when I was younger, with children who resented their father's marrying again so soon after their mother died, I was simply too odd for words. All my antiquities, and my books, and that dreadful garish thing that I would hang in the parlor—"

  "It's not garish!"

  She laughed. "It's hardly in the most contemporary of taste; especially when contemporary was Art Deco. And pockets full of coins of the Caesars, and gowns out of the Très Riches Heures, and once, as a favor to a friend, a mummy in the basement: oh, I was odd. Alarmingly so. The mummy went back home with as many of her treasures as we could find. I, unfortunately, lacked the grace to do the same."

  "So you are Greek," I said.

  She nodded.

  "The artist—he was, too?"

  "Yes," she said, "very. He wouldn't sign his work. He said that it would speak for itself."

  "It does," I said, looking at it again, as if I could begin to help myself. "Oh, it does."

  III

  That was in the early spring. In late spring, just after li
lac time, I came to ride Bali—those days, I was riding him almost every day, or driving them both with Mrs. Tiffney—and found the place deserted except for one of the stablehands. She was new and a bit shy, just waved and kept on with the stall she was cleaning.

  The stallions were both in their stalls. Usually they were out at this time of day. I wondered if they'd come up lame, or got sick. Zan didn't whip his head out the way he usually did and snap his teeth in my face. Bali didn't nicker, though he came to the door when I opened it. His eyes were clear. So was his nose. He didn't limp as I brought him out. But he wasn't himself. He didn't throw his head around on the crossties, he didn't flag his tail, he didn't grab for the back of my shirt the way he'd taken to, to see me jump. He just stood there, letting me groom him.

  I looked in Zan's stall. Zan looked back at me. Nothing wrong with him, either, that I could see or feel. Except that the spirit had gone out of him. He actually looked old. So did Bali, who was still young enough to be more a dapple than a gray.

  "You look as if you lost a friend," I said.

  Zan's ears went flat. Bali grabbed the right crosstie in his teeth and shook it, hard.

  I had a little sense left. I remembered to get him back in his stall before I bolted.

  Mrs. Tiffney was in the hospital. She'd had another fall, and maybe a heart attack. They weren't sure yet. I wouldn't have got that much out of anybody if Janna hadn't driven in as I came haring out of the barn. She looked as worn as the horses did, as if she hadn't slept in a week.

  "Last night," she said when I'd dragged her up to the office and got coffee into her. "I was downstairs borrowing some milk, or she'd have gone on lying there till God knows when. The ambulance took forever to come. Then she wanted the paramedics to carry her up to her own bed. I thought she'd have another heart attack, fighting them when they took her out."

  I gulped coffee. It was just barely warm. My throat hurt. "Is she going to be all right?"

  Janna shrugged. "They don't know yet. The harpies came in this morning—her daughters, I mean. Aileen isn't so bad, but Celia . . ." She rubbed her eyes. They must have felt as if they were full of sand. "Celia has been trying for years to make her mother live somewhere, as she puts it, `appropriate.' A nursing home, she means. She's old enough for one herself, if you ask me."

  "Maybe she thinks she's doing what's best," I said.

  "I'm sure she is," said Janna. "What's best for Celia. She'd love to have this place. She'd sell it for a golf course, probably. Or condos. Horses are a big waste of money, she says. So's that great big house up there on the hill, with just two women living in it."

  "And kids," I said, "in the summer, when you have camp."

  "Not enough profit in that." Janna put down her half-empty cup. "She married a stockbroker, but Mrs. Tiffney always said Celia did the thinking for the pair of them, in and out of the office. If she'd been born forty years later, she'd have been the broker, and she probably wouldn't have married at all."

  It still wouldn't have done Mrs. Tiffney any good, I thought, after I'd bullied Janna into bed and done what needed doing in the barn and driven slowly home. Mrs. Tiffney's horses didn't look any brighter when I looked in on them, just before I left, though, Bali let his nose rest in my palm for a minute. Thanking me, I imagined, for understanding. Just being a horse, actually, with a human he'd adopted into his personal herd.

  Mrs. Tiffney wasn't allowed visitors, except for immediate family. In Janna's opinion, and I admit in mine, the hospital would have done better to bar the family and let in the friends. Aileen did answer Janna's calls, which was more than Celia would do; so we knew that Mrs. Tiffney hadn't broken her hip again but she had had a heart attack, and she was supposed to stay very, very quiet. She'd been asking after her horses. Janna was able to pass on some of the news, though Aileen wasn't horse people; she didn't understand half of what Janna told her, and she probably mixed up the rest.

  I actually saw her with her sister, a few days after Mrs. Tiffney went to the hospital. They'd come to the house, they said, to get a few things their mother needed. I think Celia was checking out the property. They were a bit of a surprise. The slim blade of a woman in the Chanel suit turned out to be Aileen. Celia was the plump matronly lady in sensible brogues. She knew about horses and asked sharp questions about the barn's expenses. Aileen looked a little green at the dirt and the smell. She didn't touch anything, and she walked very carefully, watching where she put her feet.

  I was walking Bali down after a ride. He was still a bit off, but he'd been willing enough to work. If he'd been human, I'd have said he was drowning his sorrows. I brought him out of the ring for some of the good grass along the fence, and there was Aileen, stubbing out a cigarette and looking a little alarmed at the huge animal coming toward her. Little Bali, not quite fifteen hands, kept on coming, though I did my best to encourage him with a patch of clover. He had his sights set on another one a precise foot from Aileen's right shoe. She backed away.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "He's got a mind of his own."

  "He always did," said Aileen. She eyed him. He flopped his ears at a fly and took another mouthful of clover. "You must be Laura—Ms. Michaels, that is. My mother has told me about you."

  For some reason I wanted to cry. "Has she? She's talking, then?"

  "She's very frail, but she's quite lucid. All she can talk about, most days, is her horses, and that dreadful platter of hers. You've seen it, she says. Isn't it gaudy?"

  "I think it's quite beautiful," I said a bit stiffly—jerkily, too. Bali had thrown up his head on the other end of the leadrope, near knocking me off my feet, and attacked a fly on his flank. For an instant I thought he was going after Aileen. So did she: she beat a rapid retreat.

  But she didn't run away completely. She seemed to come to a decision. "Mother has asked to see you. Celia said no, but I think you should go."

  I stood flatfooted. Bali was cropping grass again, not a care in the world. "Why?" was all I could think to ask. "You ride her horses," said Aileen.

  Mrs. Tiffney looked even frailer than Aileen had warned me she would, white face and white hair against the white sheet, and tubes and wires and machines all doing their inscrutable business while she simply tried to stay alive. I'd been not-thinking, up till then. I'd been expecting that this would go away, she'd come back, everything would be the way it was before.

  Looking at her, I knew she wasn't coming back. She might go to a nursing home first, for a little while, but not for long. The life was ebbing out of her even while I stood there.

  She'd been asleep, I thought, till her eyes opened. They were still the same, bigger than ever in her shrunken face. Her smile made me almost forget all the rest of it. She reached out her arms to me. I hugged her, being very careful with her tubes and wires, and her brittle bones in the midst of them.

  Aileen had come in with me. When I glanced back to where she'd been, she was gone.

  "Aileen was always tactful," Mrs. Tiffney said. "Brave, even, if she saw a way to get by Celia."

  Her voice was an old-lady voice as it never had been before, thin and reedy. But no quaver in it.

  "And how are my horses?" she asked me.

  I had fifteen minutes, the nurse at the desk had told me. I spent them telling her what she most wanted to know. I babbled, maybe, to get it all in. She didn't seem to mind.

  "And my ponies?" she asked. "My Xanthos and Balios?"

  I'd been saving them for last. I started a little at their names. No one had told me that was what they were. Then I smiled. Of course the woman who had Achilles' shield—as genius had imagined it, long after Achilles was dead—would name her horses after Achilles' horses. She'd had a pair like them, Janna had told me, for as long as anyone had known her. Maybe it was part of the family tradition, like the shield on the wall.

  "They're well," I answered her, once I remembered to stop maundering and talk. "They miss you. I had Bali out this morning; Janna and I did a pas-de-deux. We walked them past th
e surrey after, and they both stopped. I swear, they were asking where you were."

  "You haven't told them?"

  She sounded so severe, and so stem, that I stared at her.

  She closed her eyes. The lids looked as thin as parchment. "No. Of course you wouldn't know. And they'd have heard people talking."

  "We've been pretty quiet," I said. And when she opened her eyes and fixed them on me: "We did talk about it while we put the horses out. We'll tell them properly if you like."

  "It would be a courtesy," she said, still severely. Then, with a glint: "However silly you may feel."

  I didn't know about feeling silly. I talked to my cats at home. I talked to the horses when I rode them or brushed them. "I'll tell them," I said.

  She shut her eyes again. I stood up. I was past my fifteen minutes. The nurse would be coming in to chase me out, unless I got myself out first. But when I started to draw back, she reached and caught my hand. I hadn't known there was so much strength in her.

  "Look after my horses," she said. "Whatever happens, look after them. Promise me."

  I'm not proud to admit that the first thing I thought of was how much it would cost to keep two horses. And the second was that Celia might have something to say about that. The third was something like a proper thought. "I'll do my best," I said..

  "You'll do it," she said. "Promise!"

  Her machines were starting to jerk and flicker. "I promise," I said, to calm her down mostly. But meaning it.

  "And the shield," she said. "That, too. They go together, the horses and the shield. When I die—"

  "You're not going to die."

  She ignored me. "When I die, they choose to whom they go. It will be you, I think. The horses have chosen you already."

  "But—"

  "Look to Xanthos. Balios is the sweet one, the one who loves more easily, who gives himself first and without reservation. Xanthos is as wise as he is wicked. He was silenced long ago, and never spoke again, but his wits are as sharp as they ever were."