Horses!

by Gardner Dozois

  "'Morning," I said.

  He replied in kind, but guardedly.

  I nodded toward his herd. "Nice horses."

  He sniffed. "You know about horses, then?"

  "Used to do a lot of riding . . . not so now."

  "They don't make you some'un who knows about horses. Lots o' people ride 'em, but don't know forelocks from withers."

  "I know one man who does—the man that spoke to you about the Gytrash."

  Henry nodded. "Him?" The little man squared his chest, stretching the string that served as buttons on his brown waistcoat. "Yep, he knew all right. Knew about horses."

  "What did you tell him about the Gytrash, Henry?" I said, coming to the point of my visit.

  His eyes crinkled at the corners. He may have been smiling but it was difficult to tell. Thickset and hard, he stood like a proud rock beside the water trough, solid, immovable. In him were all the secrets of the stones. Though a "settled" gypsy he was still closer to the natural, the dark elements of nature, than most men alive.

  "Are you going to tell me?" I said.

  "You want to know if he saw it?"

  My silence conveyed my answer.

  "You have to know, don't 'un? Desperate passions, those o' yours. Dangerous ones, I think. Well, I'll say this—his soul's damned. I warned 'im. I warned 'im hard, but he took not a bit o' notice. That fellow's a goner. Ain't no saving the lost. Stay away from things like that, gamekeeper. There's more bad in them than a sane man can tell."

  "You think he's insane?" I said, hopefully, grasping at the single word I had wanted to hear.

  "He will be. Don't you think he won't. You can't pluck things out o' the darkness and then go home an' forget 'em. Once they get a hold of your mind, they don't let go—like my old dog over there," he pointed. "Once he's got 'is teeth into a rag, you won't get 'un back except it's in tatters. A soul in tatters is a mind that's mad, gamekeeper. Stay away from 'un."

  He walked off then, without a backward glance. The confirmation I had required had been shredded for me by Henry. And I? I was nothing. A mere bystander content to wear a blindfold. Then there was Catherine. She was to die, if she was not already dead. The sacrifice. The willing sacrifice.

  For the next two months I spent restless days at my work, fixing fences, ripping out poachers' snares and generally carrying on with my duties with half a mind. At night I would sit up, staring out of the window into the darkness, wondering about the things that lay in wait out there. I would sit until I was too tired to keep my eyes open and either fall asleep in the chair or crawl away to my bed. I saw Henry several times, but we merely acknowledged each other with a nod or wave of the finger. Then, one afternoon, I returned to the cottage for a bite of food, and found Jake sitting outside on my window bench.

  His appearance penetrated any security I had salvaged since our last meeting. He had always been a thin man, but now he was emaciated, haggard and brittle-looking. He raised two red-rimmed eyes at my approach and the sorrow I saw in their depths, the anguish and grief, was frightening.

  "You'd better come in," I said, unlocking the door with a trembling hand.

  He entered, a wraith-like figure whose clothes hung from him. It seemed that if I were to touch him, he would crumble into nothing but dust and sighs. He sat in the chair; hung from it rather.

  "She died then?" I said, softly.

  "Yes." The sound was a mere breath of wind from between his lips.

  "Poor Catherine," I murmured. "I didn't know her, but . . . His head jerked up. "Not Catherine." His voice was as dry as old paper, rustling. "Not her. She's still . . . alive."

  "Who then? Somebody died. You just said so." I could feel something stirring in my blood—that ominous presence that had been with me on the night he had told me about the Gytrash.

  "I don't know."

  "You don't know? I . . . where's the understanding in this?"

  His hands came together like two bundles of sticks. With a dry, rasping sound he rubbed them together.

  "This. Catherine didn't die, therefore someone did. I came to tell you this before ... There's nothing left for me. Nothing. She's gone, you see. The one person that could have changed my life. I killed her ... murdered her with my selfish obsession."

  "This is ludicrous . . .

  "No. No, it's not." His eyes were a sulphurous yellow, and hot upon my own.

  "Meaning what, for God's sake?"

  "I called the Gytrash prematurely—that meant someone would have to die . . .'

  "Yes, yes. You told me that. A loved one . . . the closest to you."

  There were bitter tears now, and I turned away, embarrassed for him.

  "Don't you see," he said. "Not someone I know—someone I hadn't met. I called it up prematurely. Someone—a woman who would have loved me—whom I would have loved more deeply than I have ever loved anyone—that someone died. I don't even know her name. She died before we met and I destroyed myself with her—any purpose I had in this world—Catherine is still alive. It wasn't her. I spoke to the gypsies thinking that it was just a matter of time, but they said no, the night after. The night after I called the Gytrash, my love .. . His voice cracked. "She would have died. I killed a woman that could have saved me. The one person on this earth with whom I could have shared this life—do you understand now?"

  My cheeks were tight against the bone.

  "Yes. I think so. Out there, amongst the unknown masses, was...

  "Her. I can't even put flowers on her grave. I can't even wet the earth with these useless tears. I never even knew her! Everywhere I go, each place, I think, did she live here? Was that her house? Perhaps she visited this pub or dined at this restaurant? I look for signs of her—signs I would not even recognize. I see women in the street and wonder, was she like that? Did she have blonde hair, or brown? What color were her eyes? Did her laughter sound like that woman's laughter? Was she wise, tender, understanding, serious, humorous, intelligent? I have nothing but questions, and no answers. How can you know . . . ?"

  "I don't know. I can't know. Neither can you. Perhaps you're tormenting yourself for nothing, Jake. Maybe . . . maybe what you saw was contained in your own mind? A hallucination. Maybe no one has died."

  His sallow cheeks tightened. Bitterness replaced the sorrow in his eyes.

  "Yes. I know that much. I saw the Gytrash. A woman died, somewhere, out there in the world. I killed her, whoever she was. You only get one opportunity and I've obliterated mine. I destroyed it before it had a chance to happen. Ugly, isn't it? Terribly, terribly ugly. Well, that's that. I've left Catherine. Not her fault. She's got her chance to come. So have you. Give Catherine a call—you never know— some good might come out of this."

  He stood up and walked towards the door. I stretched out a hand to stop him. "Stay here the night, Jake, we'll talk about it in the morning."

  He hesitated, then said, "I am so tired. Maybe you're right." He ran a hand through his matted, disheveled hair. There was a bleakness in his expression that worried me. I did not want him doing anything stupid. He was so obviously distraught and under tremendous internal pressure.

  He said, "I'm sorry—to drag you into all this."

  "It's all right," I lied. "This whole thing could be wrong, you know—you're working on assumptions. Let's get some sleep, then try to rationalize it all."

  He smiled grimly. "You can't rationalize emotions, not with talk, not with argument. You—I know what you think—that the human mind is—strange—powerful. You're hoping that what I saw out on the marshes was the product of a distorted reality—perceptions warped by an intense, overactive imagination; by heightened senses in a fever-ridden atmosphere. It's not so. I wish it were. That black beast appeared to me—and I have to take the consequences of promoting that appearance. I feel it here. . . ." He tapped his chest, over his heart. "I know she's gone. I know the world is lighter of one human being—the one that could have made me whole, with a relationship that

  I can never now experi
ence. You were right—I exchanged a lightning thrill for a complete life. I destroyed two people that night—and I was one of them. The other, I'll never know."

  "Sleep," I insisted. "You're worn down to nothing. Let's talk tomorrow."

  He nodded and I showed him to my bedroom. I left him there and went down to the sofa, where I spent an uncomfortable and restless night. When the morning came the sparrows woke me, clustering in a tree outside my window. I lay there for a few minutes observing the changing fragments of gray caught between the stark, crazed network of branches and recalled the events of the previous evening. I felt numb inside. What was I going to say to him that would help him in any way? You cannot convince a man whose whole mind has reshaped itself around a negative idea, that he is wrong. I could produce nothing in the way of evidence to substantiate an argument that ran counter to his belief. He believed he had precipitated the death of his one chance of happiness. You only get one chance. And what did I believe?—that he had created a state of mind which had enabled him to externalize his subconscious desires: that the scenes on the marshes were fantasies projected through his eyes, onto the screen of an empty landscape: that what he had witnessed was the showing of a celluloid dream filmed by his receptive mind? Yet, his conviction that his future love had perished had formed dark lanes in my rationalization. My mind rejected his beliefs, but my soul absorbed them eagerly, as confirmation of its earlier acceptance of a superphysical world beyond blood, flesh, and bone, where one was safe from the thunder of the Captains; safe from the horrors of ritual and order; safe from a life in which actions were repetitive and timed to precision, and impulsiveness, initiative, spontaneity and eccentricity were taboo. If he could have found love, real love, with its wild, energetic gestures and chaotic motion, he would have been safe. Love plays havoc with order. Love is delightful in its irrationality and its scorn of discipline. Love fashions its clocks from ill-fitting cogs of emotion and wheels of impulse. I rose and made two coffees, taking one upstairs to give to Jake.

  He was gone.

  I stood there, stupidly holding the hot coffee, and stared at the state of the room. Bewilderment gradually dawned into a kind of comprehension. He had left the room in complete order. The blankets had been folded into an immaculate bedpack, squared and sharply creased, at the top of the bed. He had taken all my toilet articles and laid them out neatly, conforming to the diagrams we had followed for military inspections. My shoes were in a row at the end of the bed, lace-ends tucked tightly into the top two eyeholes. Shirts, suits, underwear, socks, ties—all were folded in the correct military manner and displayed according to regulations. Even my writing materials, pad, envelopes and pens, had been placed precisely in their correct mandatory positions on the bedside cabinet. The whole room had been dusted and straightened to a stark, clean, dull uniformity.

  It was a chilling sight.

  I knew then that nothing could save him. His determination was evident in that display of regimentation and order. Whether he had done it consciously, as some kind of sign to me, or because of some inner compulsion over which he had no control, I never discovered. The Captains had won after all. They had broken him.

  A week later, I went to the funeral. It was a small, dismal affair attended by one or two military types, and Catherine. She and I exchanged only a few words; the guilt, whether justified or not, forced us apart quickly, like two magnets of the same polarities. Neither of us, I am sure, felt we had anything in common that was not linked by Jake—sad to say—for it might have indicated something.

  Brothers of the Wind

  by

  Jane Yolen

  One of the most distinguished of modern fantasists, Jane Yolen has been compared to writers such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Perrault, and has been called "the Hans Christian Andersen of the twentieth century." Primarily known for her work for children and young adults, Yolen has produced more than sixty books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry collections, picture books, biographies, and a book of essays on folklore and fairy tales. She has received the Golden Kite Award and the World Fantasy Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. In recent years, she has also been writing more adult-oriented fantasy, work which has appeared in collections such as Tales of Wonder, Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk, Dragonfield and Other Stories, and Merlin's Booke, and in novels such as Cards of Grief, Sister Light, Sister Dark, and White Jenna. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.

  Here she spins a touching tale of how sometimes, against all odds, loyalty is rewarded with wonder—and with love.

  The Foal

  In the Far Reaches of the Desert, where men and horses are said to dwell as brothers, a foal was born with wings. The foal was unremarkable in color, a muted brown with no markings. However, the wings—small and crumpled, with fragile ribs and a membrane of gray skin—made it the center of all eyes.

  But the sheik who owned the foal was not pleased. He stood over the newborn, pulling on his graying beard. He shook his head and furrowed his brow. Then he turned quickly, his white robes spinning about him, casting dervish shadows on the ground.

  "This must be Allah's jest," he said contemptuously to the slave who tended his horses. "But I do not find it amusing. If horses were meant to be birds, they would be born with beaks and an appetite for flies."

  "It is so," said the slave.

  "Take the foal out into the desert," said the sheik. "Perhaps the sands will welcome this jest with better humor than I."

  "At once, master," said the slave. He spoke to the sheik's back, for his master had already left the tent.

  The slave clapped his hands twice. At the sound, so sharp in the desert's silence, a boy appeared. His name was Lateef, the tender one, the one full of pity and tears. He was an orphan's orphan and small for his age, with dark hair and skin the color of an old coin. His eyes burned fiercely, black suns in a bronze sky, but they were always quick to cloud over. And though Lateef was handsome and hardworking, the sheik's chief slave knew that the boy's tenderness was a great fault and that he was often the butt of jokes. Indeed, without a living mother or father to teach him other ways or to protect him from his tormentors, he was at the mercy of all. Lateef was always given the hardest and most unpleasant chores to do. He was the lowest slave in the sheik's household.

  "I am here," Lateef said in his gentle voice.

  "Ah, the tender one," said the keeper of horses. "Do you see this foal? This new one? It is not pleasing to our master. It is Allah's jest. For if a horse were meant to be a bird, it would make a nest of sticks and straw."

  Lateef looked down at the foal as it sucked contentedly at its mother's teat. He loved being with the horses, for only with them did Lateef feel brave and strong. The little foal's sides moved in and out, and at each movement the fragile, membranous wings seemed to flutter. Lateef's hand moved to touch one wing, and his heart filled with wonder.

  But the keeper of horses spoke cruelly, cutting across Lateef's thoughts. "You are to take this jest far out beyond the sight of the oasis and leave it in the sand." He turned in imitation of the sheik, his robes spinning around him.

  Lateef spoke as the turn began. "Perhaps ..." he said daringly. "Perhaps it is not Allah's jest at all. Perhaps . . . perhaps . .." and he spoke so softly, he almost did not say it aloud. "Perhaps it is Allah's test."

  The keeper of horses stopped in midturn, his exit ruined, his robes collapsing in confused folds and entangling his ankles.

  "You piece of carrion," he said in a loud, tight voice. "Do you dare to question the sheik?"

  "Yes. No. But I thought ..." Lateef began.

  "You have no thoughts," said the keeper of horses. "You are a slave. A slave of slaves. You will do only as you are ordered."

  "So let it be," murmured Lateef, his eyes filling. He looked meekly at the ground until the keeper of horses had left the tent. But though his eyes were on the ground, his mind was not. Questions spun inside his head. T
his wonder, this foal with wings—might it not truly be Allah's test? And what if he failed this test as he seemed to fail everything else? He had to think about it. And, even though a slave must not think, he could not stop himself.

  "And do it at once!" came the command through the tent flap as the keeper of horses poked his head in for one last word. "You are not only too tender but also too slow."

  Lateef took a wineskin that hung from a leather thong on the side of the tent to fill it with milk from the foal's mother. He shouldered the foal aside and softly squeezed the milk in steady streams into an earthen bowl, then carefully poured it from the bowl into the skin flask. While Lateef worked, the foal nuzzled his ear and even tried to suck on it.

  When the skin flask was full, Lateef knelt and put his head under the foal's belly, settling the small creature around his shoulders. Then he stood slowly, holding on to the foal's thin legs. The foal made only one tiny sound, between a sigh and a whicker, and then lay still. Lateef kept up a continual flow of words, almost a song.

  "Little brother, new and weak," he crooned, "we must go out into the sun. Do not fear the eye of God, for all that has happened, all that will happen, is already written. And if it is written that we brothers will survive, it will surely be so."

  Then Lateef walked out of the tent.

  The Desert

  Lateef and the foal both blinked as the bright sun fell upon them. From the inside of the tent, the mare cried out, an anguished farewell. The foal gave a little shudder and was still.

  But Lateef was not still. He looked around once at the village of tents that rimmed the oasis. He watched as some slave girls, younger even than he, bent over the well and drew up water. He had known them all his life, but they were still strangers to him. His mother had died at his birth; her mother had died the same way. He was indeed an orphan's orphan, a no-man's child, a slave of slaves. He would leave this home of familiar strangers with no regrets and take his burden—jest or test—out into the burning sands. He had thought about it, though thinking was not for slaves. He had thought about it and decided that he would stay with the foal. His orders were to take it out into the sands. And perhaps the keeper of horses expected them both to die there. But what if their deaths were not written? Could that be part of Allah's test? He would go out into the sands as ordered, and then turn north to Akbir. Akbir, the city of dreams. If it were written anywhere that the foal was to live, in Akbir that writing could be understood.