Horses!

by Gardner Dozois

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. She'd gone out of her head. She was dreaming old dreams, taking the name for the thing, and making her very real if by no means ordinary horses into horses out of a story. I'd done it myself when I was younger: little rafter-hipped cranky-tempered Katisha was the Prophet's own chosen mare, because she was a bay with one white foot and a star. But that hadn't made her the first of the Khamsa, any more than Mrs. Tiffney's wishing made her horses Achilles' horses. Or her shield—her neoclassical masterpieceAchilles's shield.

  They were treasures enough by themselves. I almost said so. But she was holding so tight, and looking so urgent, that I just nodded.

  She nodded back. "The first moonlit night after I die, make sure you're at the barn. Watch the horses. Do whatever they ask you to do."

  What could I do, except nod?

  She let me go so suddenly that I gasped. But she was still breathing. "Remember," she said, no more than a whisper.

  Then the nurse came charging in, took a look at the monitors, and ordered me out. The last I saw of Mrs. Tiffney was the nurse's white back and Mrs. Tiffney's white face, and her eyes on me, willing me to remember.

  V

  She died two days later, early in the morning of a gray and rainy day. She went in her sleep, Janna told me, and she went without pain. When I saw her laid out in the casket—and how Celia could think the shield was gaudy and reckon peach satin and mahogany with brass fittings tasteful, I would never understand—she was smiling. The funeral parlor was so full of flowers I could barely breathe, and so full of people I couldn't move, though it tended to flow toward the casket and then away into clumps on the edges. I recognized people from the barn, wide-eyed, white-faced kids with their parents, older ones alone or with friends, looking intensely uncomfortable but very determined, and the boarders in a cluster near the door. They all looked odd and half-complete in suits and dresses, without horses beside them or peering over their shoulders.

  I said a proper few words to Celia, who didn't seem to recognize me, and to Aileen, who did. Celia didn't look as triumphant as I suspected she felt. He mother had been such a trial to her for so long, and now the trial was over. She'd get the property and the estate—she'd have to share with Aileen, of course, and there'd be bequests, but she'd hardly care for that. She'd administer it all, if she had anything to say about it.

  "She lived a full life," a woman said behind me in the syrupy voice some people reserve for funerals. "She died happy. Doesn't she look wonderful, Celia?"

  There was a knot in my throat, so thick and so solid that I couldn't swallow. I said something to somebody—it might have been Janna, who didn't look wonderful, either—and got out of there.

  The horses were real. They didn't make empty noises, or drown me in flowers. Bali stood still while I cried in his mane, and when I wrapped my arms around his neck, he wrapped his neck around me.

  Finally I pulled back. He had an infection, or something in the new hay had got to him: his eyes were streaming. So, when I turned around, were Zan's. I sniffed hard and got a cloth for them and a tissue for me, and wiped us all dry. "All right," I said. "So you're crying, too. Horses don't cry. You've got an allergy. What is it, mold in the hay?"

  Bali bit me. Not hard enough to do damage, but hard enough to hurt. I was so shocked that I didn't even whack his nose; just stood there. And he shouldered past me. He didn't have a halter on. I'd come in to the stall to get him, forgotten the halter on its hook, and starting bawling. I grabbed for him. He kept on going.

  Zan arched his neck, oh so delicately, and bared his long yellow teeth, and slid the bar on his door. I lunged. He was out, not moving fast at all, just fast enough to stay out of my reach.

  I snatched halters on the way by. Zan pirouetted in the aisle and plucked them both out of my hands, and gave me a look that said as clear as if he'd spoken, "Not those, stupid." Then he spun again and waited.

  I heard Mrs. Tiffney's voice. I was imagining it, of course. Watch the horses. Do whatever they ask you to do.

  They certainly weren't acting like normal stallions on the loose. Bali was waiting, up past Zan, with his most melting expression. Zan—there was no other word for it—glared. His opinion of my intelligence, never very high to begin with, was dropping fast.

  And it was dark, but there was a moon, a white half-moon in a field of stars like the ones in the center of the shield. Which was resting against the barn wall, just outside the door to the yard. And where the surrey used to stand was something else. I told myself it was the moon that made the old-fashioned black carriage look like something ages older and much smaller, and not black at all. Not in the least. That was gold, glimmering in the light from the aisle. And gold on the harness that lay on the ground beside it.

  "But," I said, "I don't know how to yoke up a chariot."

  Zan snorted at me. Bali was kinder. He went up to the pole that rested on the ground and positioned himself just so, and cocked an ear. After a minute Zan did the same, but his ears were flat in disgust. If he was choosing me, whatever that meant, he wasn't going to make it easy.

  The harness wasn't that hard to figure out, once I'd had a good look at it. Or as good as moonlight and aislelight would give me. The yoke, of course, instead of collars. The bridles were familiar enough, and the reins. I ran those the way they seemed to want to run. The horses were patient, even Zan.

  When they were harnessed, I stood back. I don't know what I was thinking. Nothing, by then. Except maybe that this wasn't happening. Something in the combination of moonlight and barn light made the horses shine. Bali, of course, with his silver mane and tail and his pewter coat. But Zan, too, a light that seemed to grow the longer I stood there, not silver but gold, lambent in the dark.

  "Immortal horses," I said. "Bright gifts the gods gave to Peleus, and he to his son, and his son—" I broke off. `But the gods are dead!"

  Zan shook his head in the bridle, baring his teeth at me. Bali watched me quietly. His ear slanted back. Get in the chariot, he meant. And how I knew that, I didn't want to know. No more than how I knew to pick up the shield—heavy as all heaven, but lighter than I'd expected, even so—and hang it where it best seemed to fit, by the left side of the chariot. I picked up the reins. They weren't any different from driving the surrey, though I was standing up in a vehicle that seemed no heavier than an eggshell, and no better sprung than one either, for all its pretty gilding. I didn't pretend that I was telling the horses where to go. They started at a walk, maneuvering carefully out of the yard where I'd seen Lipizzans, so long ago it seemed now, though it wasn't even nine months. Hardly long enough to carry a baby to term.

  They took the way I'd driven so often, down the road a bit and into the woods. The moon didn't quite reach through the new leaves, but the horses were shining, silver and red-gold, bright enough to light the woods around them. The track was clear and smooth. They stretched into a trot.

  The wind was soft in my face. It was a warm night, the first after a week of damp and rain, and everything smelled green, with sweetness that was apple blossoms, growing stronger as we went on. By the time we came out into the orchard, my lungs were full of it.

  The trees were all in bloom, and the moon made them shine as bright almost as Bali's coat. He was cantering now, he and his brother, and the chariot rocked and rattled. I wrapped the reins around the post that seemed made for just that, and concentrated on hanging on. If I'd had any sense at all I would have hauled the horses down to a walk, turned them around and made them go back home. But all the strangeness had caught up with me. My head was full of moon and night and apple blossoms, and old, old stories, and the shield-rim under my left hand and the chariot's side under my right, and the horses running ahead of me, the chestnut, the gray, Xanthos, Balios, who couldn't be, who couldn't begin to be, but who surely were.

  And I'd inherited them. I'd had the letter this morning, in her firm clear hand, with a date on it that made me start: the day after I'd first seen the shield. The sh
ield was mine, if the horses chose me; and they were mine, too, and the wherewithal to keep and house them. That was how she put it. Tonight, in the way the moon's light fell, I knew that Janna had an inheritance, too; that Celia would be very surprised when the will was read. Oh, she'd have a handsome sum, and she'd grow richer than she'd been to begin with, once she'd invested it. And Aileen had a sum as large, which she wouldn't manage a tenth as well, unless she handed it over to Celia. But the land was Janna's, and the barn, and the horses, and the house, and everything that went with them, except Xanthos and Balios and the shield that a god had made to protect a legend in battle.

  The moon had made a seer of me. I'd wake up in the morning with a headache and a sour stomach, and maybe a little regret for the dream I'd lost in waking.

  It didn't feel like a dream, for all its strangeness. The night air was real, and the branch that whipped my face as the horses turned, mounting the hill. From the top of it, over the orchard that surrounded it, you could see for miles, down to the river on one side and over the ridges on the other, rolling outward in circles, with towns in the hollows, and fields full of cows, and the Riccis' vineyard with its rows of vines on poles; and maybe, through a gap in the last ridge, a glimmer that was the ocean. Here was higher than the hill Mrs. Tiffney's house stood on: it lay just below, with the barns beyond it. In the daytime you could see the rings and the hunt course, and the riders going through their paces like a dance.

  Tonight the orchard was like a field of snow, and the hills were dark with once in a while a glimmer of light, and where Mrs. Tiffney's house stood, a shadow with a light at the top of it. Janna, home where she belonged, alone in the quiet rooms.

  I found I couldn't care that she might be checking the barn, and she'd find the lights on and Mrs. Tiffney's horses missing. Or maybe she wouldn't. Maybe it was all dark and quiet, the doors shut, the horses asleep, everything asleep but me, and the horses who had brought me here. I got down from the chariot and went to their heads, smoothing Bali's forelock, venturing—carefully—to stroke Zan's neck. He allowed it. I slid my hand to the poll, round the ear, down past the plate of the cheek. He didn't nip or pull away. I touched the velvet of his nose. He blew into my palm. His eyes were bright. Immortal eyes. "How do you stand it?" I asked him. "Bound to mortal flesh that withers and dies, and you never age a day? How many have you loved, and however long they lived, in the end, all too soon, they died?"

  He didn't speak. He'd been able to, once. I saw it in his eyes. Dust and clamor and a terrible roil of war, the charioteer cut down, the loved one—loved more than the master, for the master owned them, but the charioteer belonged to them, Patroklos who was never strong enough to fight his prince's battle—and the bitterness after, the prince taking vengeance, and the stallion speaking, foretelling the master's death. He'd grieved for the prince, too, and the prince's son in his time, and his son's son, and how it had come to daughters instead of sons—that he wasn't telling me. It was enough that it had been.

  Bali rested his nose on my shoulder. Zan nipped lightly, very lightly, at my palm. Claiming me. The wind blew over us. West wind.

  I laughed, up there on the hilltop, with the wind in my hair. Little no-name no-pedigree horses: by west wind out of storm wind, or maybe she had been a Harpy, like Celia and her sister. I belonged to them now. And a gaudy great platter that owned me as much as they did.

  I'd cry again in a little while. I'd lost a friend; I owed her grief. But she'd be glad that I could laugh, who'd known exactly what she was doing when she filled her yard with Lipizzans and lured me in, and snared me for her stallions.

  I leaned on Xanthos' shoulder, and Balios leaned lightly on mine. They were shining still, and brighter than the moon, but they were warm to the touch, real and solid horses. We stood there, the three of us, mortal I and immortal they, and watched the moon go down.

  The Wonder Horse

  by

  George Byram

  Here's one of the classic SF stories of horses and horse racing—and a quintessential demonstration of that old adage, Blood Will Tell .. .

  As far as we can tell, this clever little story, from a 1957 Atlantic Monthly, is George Byram's only venture into the science fiction field, although he has also sold stories to Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post, True West, and Sports Afield, among other markets. He has been a television announcer, a horse breeder, and has published two novels, The Piper's Tune and Tomorrow's Hidden Season.

  Webster says a mutation is a sudden variation, the offspring differing from the parents in some well-marked character or characters—and that certainly fits Red Eagle. He was foaled of registered parents, both his sire and dam descending from two of the best bloodlines in the breed. But the only thing normal about this colt was his color, a beautiful chestnut.

  I attended Red Eagle's arrival into the world. He was kicking at the sac that enclosed him as I freed his nostrils from the membrane. He was on his feet in one minute. He was straight and steady on his pasterns by the time his dam had him licked dry. He had his first feeding before he was five minutes old, and he was beginning to buck and rear and prance by the time I got my wits about me and called Ben.

  Ben came in the other end of the ramshackle barn from the feed lot. He was small as men go, but big for a jockey. Not really old at forty-two, his hair was gray and he was old in experience of horses.

  Ben came into the box stall and as he saw the colt he stopped and whistled. He pushed back his hat and studied the red colt for a full five minutes. Even only minutes old a horseman could see he was markedly different. The bones from stifle to hock and elbow to knee were abnormally long. There was unusual length and slope of shoulder. He stood high in the croup and looked like he was running downhill. He had a very long underline and short back. All this spelled uniquely efficient bone levers, and these levers were connected and powered by the deepest hard-twisted muscles a colt ever brought into this world. Unbelievable depth at the girth and immense spring to the ribs meant an engine of heart and lungs capable of driving those muscled levers to their maximum. Red Eagle's nostrils were a third larger than any we had ever seen and he had a large, loose windpipe between his broad jaws. He would be able to fuel the engine with all the oxygen it could use. Most important of all, the clean, sharp modeling of his head and the bigness and luster of his eyes indicated courage, will to win. But because of his strange proportions he looked weird.

  "Holy Mary," said Ben softly, and I nodded agreement.

  Ben and I had followed horses all our lives. I as a veterinarian and trainer for big breeders, Ben as a jockey. Each of us had outserved his usefulness. Ben had got too heavy to ride; I had got too cantankerous for the owners to put up with. I had studied bloodlines and knew the breeders were no longer improving the breed, but I could never make anyone believe in my theories. One owner after another had decided he could do without my services. Ben and I had pooled our savings and bought a small ranch in Colorado. We had taken the mare that had just foaled in lieu of salary from our last employer. Barton Croupwell had laughed when we had asked for the mare rather than our money.

  "Costello," he said to me, "you and Ben have twenty-five hundred coming. That mare is nineteen years old. She could drop dead tomorrow."

  "She could have one more foal too," I said.

  "She could, but it's five to two she won't."

  "That's good enough odds for the kind of blood she's carrying."

  Croupwell was a gambler who raised horses for only one reason: to make money. He shook his head. "I've seen old codgers set in their thinking, but you're the worst. I suppose you've got a stallion picked out—in case this mare'll breed."

  "He doesn't belong to you," I said.

  That needled him. "I've got stallions that bring five thousand for a stud fee. Don't tell me they aren't good enough."

  "Their bloodlines are wrong," I answered. "Mr. Carvelliers has a stallion called Wing Away."

  "Carvelliers' stallions cost money. Are you and Ben th
at flush?" He already knew what I had in mind.

  "You and Carvelliers trade services," I said. "It wouldn't cost you anything to have the mare bred."

  He threw back his head and laughed. He was a tall, thin man, always beautifully tailored, with black hair and a line of mustache. "I'm not a philanthropist," he said. "Do you really want this mare?"

  "I said I did."

  "You really think she'll get with foal?"

  "I'll turn your odds around. I say it's five to two she will."

  "I'll gamble with you," he said. "I'll send the mare over to Carvelliers'. If she settles I'll take care of the stud fee. If she doesn't, I keep the mare."

  "And my and Ben's twenty-five hundred?"

  "Of course."

  "You're no gambler," I said, looking him in the eye, "but I'll take the bet."

  Now, Ben and I were looking at a running machine that was something new on the face of the earth.

  Our ranch, was perfect for training the colt. It was out of the way and we took particular care that no one ever saw Red Eagle. By the time he was a yearling, our wildest estimate of what he would be had fallen short. Ben began to ride him when he was a coming two-year-old. By that time he had reached seventeen hands, weighed twelve hundred pounds, and could carry Ben's hundred and twenty-six as if Ben were nothing. Every time Ben stepped off him he was gibbering like an idiot. I was little better. This horse didn't run; he flowed. Morning after morning as Ben began to open him up I would watch him coming down the track we had dozed out of the prairie and he looked like a great wheel with flashing spokes rolling irresistibly forward. Carrying as much weight as mature horses are asked to carry, our stop watch told us Red Eagle had broken every world record for all distances and this on an imperfect track. Ben and I were scared.

  One night when the racing season was close upon us, Ben said nervously, "I've made a few calls to some jockeys I know. Croupwell's and Carvelliers' and some others. The best twoyear-olds they got are just normal, good colts. Red Eagle will beat them twenty lengths."