Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  It was strong. It filled him with certainty. He was the Walker Between the Worlds. He would be a maker of kings and a ruler of the People. He would be as shamans had been in the old time, great in power and terrible in his strength.

  5

  Wolfcub heard what the shaman said to Linden, and how Linden played into his hands with almost distressing ease. Wolfcub had been going hunting himself, but alone, as he preferred to do. It was easier to track the deer without a pack of idiots baying at his back.

  But once he had seen that Linden meant to bring the shaman a delicacy for his dinner, Wolfcub attached himself to the end of the riding. No one minded at all. Wolfcub was the odd one, the one who liked to hunt alone, but he was also the son of the great hunter of the People, and a hunter of prowess himself. He was always welcome on hunts, no matter what impudence he might have offered the prince.

  Linden, at least, had a short memory for slights. He was an easy man, which might be a virtue, or might not. Wolfcub could never quite decide. He was carrying the pretty bow that Wolfcub had given him, for he cherished it: it was, like his horse, like himself, lovely to look at if not particularly practical.

  Wolfcub, whose horse was no beauty, but hardy and sensible, shrugged to himself and made his way to a place not far behind Linden. If Linden was going to risk his neck going after a sow and her piglets, Wolfcub would do what he could to keep the fool alive. The fool was, after all, the king’s son.

  oOo

  A pack of wild pigs had made itself a tribe some distance down the river, where an outcropping of rock gave shelter, and a little thicket of wind-torn trees offered roots to graze among. The boar had claimed the upper reaches of the hill, the sows and piglets the rest.

  If Wolfcub had been consulted, which clearly he had not, he would have preferred that they hunt deer, whose meat was sweeter and who did not turn a hunt into a battle. But there was no glory in hunting deer when there was a boar to hunt.

  This one had been lord of his tribe for a hand of seasons now. This was not the first hunt he had seen. Nor might it be the last. He had killed men who came against him, taken wounds that would have slain a lesser beast, but escaped to his lair and mended, and come back in time to challenge a new hunt.

  oOo

  They left the horses to graze just out of sight of the boar’s rock, with a handful of sullen boys to look after them. On foot then, and as softly as they knew how, they made their way toward the rock. Brighteyes, who was best with the dogs, had whipped in the leaders and bound them, so that the others followed with heads and tails low. They would have their part to play in the hunt, but not yet—not too soon.

  Wolfcub hung back somewhat, still within spearcast of Linden, but out of the crush of young men. He was wary, half of the sows and their great boar, half of the shaman who had dared the prince to come here. Wolfcub did not trust the Walker Between the Worlds. That one had ambitions, he thought, beyond the simple reading of prophecies for the People to marvel at.

  And maybe he wanted Linden dead. Or maybe he did not. Wolfcub was not sure, yet.

  But of this he could be sure: he would do what he could to keep his king’s son safe. Not for any love of the pretty idiot, but because he was the king’s son. And, certainly, because Wolfcub loved Walker not at all.

  At this hour of the day, their quarry rooted and idled about the base of the rock. The great sow, the mother of the tribe, cast her bulk in the shade of the trees, while her piglets played at battle or at feeding in the leafmold nearby. Other, lesser sows fed beyond them, or lay as she lay and nursed their own litters. Of the boar there was no sign.

  That meant little, Wolfcub knew. The old warrior would have heard them coming from far away, and would know what they intended. He would wait and watch, and when they were off guard, he would attack.

  They had to hope that they took their prey and escaped before the boar came. Though Linden might hope for something else—for the boar himself, his hot heart’s blood springing over Linden’s hands. The shaman had asked a thing that was mad, perhaps knowing Linden would want something madder still.

  There was nothing Wolfcub could do for that, except watch and wait. Linden went in among the trees, the more fool he, rather than let Brighteyes loose the dogs to bring the sow and her litter to him. He went in and the rest followed; Brighteyes, too, and the dogs, the whole lot of them, trampling into the shade of branches, tangling themselves in underbrush.

  They were men of the steppe, high-grass people. Trees were alien. Sky shielded by branches, feet tangled by undergrowth—they knew nothing of such things. Wolfcub, hunter and son of a hunter, had made himself familiar with them, the better to excel at his craft.

  The lesser pigs squealed and scattered, but the great sow knew no such cowardice. Her grunt brought her piglets flocking. Most fell greedily to nursing at her udders, but one or two, bolder than the rest, watched the hunters come.

  She surged up, shedding piglets. Linden laughed and taunted her, dancing his mockery. She charged.

  He was not there. But his noose was—the same rope of braided leather that he used to catch his horse, and strong enough to hold an enraged stallion.

  A charging sow strained it, but not to breaking. He leaped to lash it round the trunk of a tree. The tree groaned as the rope snapped taut, but held. The sow dropped like a stone.

  Linden sprang in to bind her fore and aft. Then, still laughing, he milked a skinful out of her, while his following pursued her piglets. They caught one; the rest were too quick or too slippery to hold.

  Still Wolfcub hung back. Linden rose triumphant, brandishing his skin of sow’s milk—and, with a slash so swift the sow must scarce have felt it, took the udder he had drained it from.

  He should have left the sow bound; but that was a good rope. He freed her. She lunged, screaming in rage. He danced away, mocking her, but not altogether in folly: he had his boar-spear.

  So too a handful of others. They circled her, whooping above her squeals, laughing and singing battle-songs.

  The boar came without a sound. He was huge, and yet he passed like a shadow through the thickets. His eyes were tiny and blood-red. His tusks curved thrice, piercing his lip with each curve, till they arched, spear-sharp and gleaming, on either side of his eyes.

  Wolfcub saw him clearly, far more clearly than he ever wanted to see such a beast. The boar plunged straight for the one who had violated his consort. Men and dogs fell before him.

  Wolfcub was ready—as ready as any man could be for such an assault. He had braced himself, and secured his spearbutt in a knot of roots. As the boar came on, he called out, a deep grunting cry like the challenge of boar to boar.

  The boar heard. He veered—only slightly, but it was enough. He launched himself at Wolfcub.

  The spear would not hold. No spear could. Nothing of fire-hardened wood or tempered bone was strong enough. But it slowed him. It freed the others to escape bearing their prizes, the piglet and the skin of milk, though they had perforce to leave the sow behind.

  Wolfcub crouched eye to eye with the great boar. The boar was pure living rage. Wolfcub was pure blind fear. Almost he lost the power to move. The boar’s breath was hot in his face, so fetid that he gagged.

  That freed him. He flung himself backward, rolled, came up running, bolting toward the light.

  The boar sprang after him. But the spear was lodged in its breast, amid more scars than Wolfcub dared to count. It slowed him; staggered him.

  He fell to his knees. His great body, so heavy in the head and shoulders, so light behind, tumbled end over end. Wolfcub darted out of its path. Even in midair the boar slashed with hooves and tusks.

  When it fell, the earth shook. Wolfcub stumbled and went down. Fire burned his leg. He scrambled away.

  The boar did not come after him. It did not rise. It lay, massive and still. The spear lodged deep in its breast.

  Wolfcub should not stop. Should not even pause. It was feigning death, surely it was. It was the great boa
r, the king of boars, the mocker of all who hunted it, slayer of men and hounds and horses. It could not be dead.

  And yet no breath stirred that massive body. Blood and foam stained the tusks. The stink of death overlay the stink of boar.

  Like a fool or a madman—like Linden, if Linden had lingered—Wolfcub approached the carcass. No life trembled in it. What no man had been able to do, the boar’s own weight and speed, and a spear lodged just so, had done and more than done. The great boar was dead.

  6

  Linden was to come back triumphant—or dead, but Walker had no real expectation of that. A great deed, a feat of prowess, would serve Walker’s purpose well.

  Linden came back with the piglet and the udder and the milk, but that paled beside the greater feat: the great boar, the king boar, was dead. But Linden had not killed him, or presumed to claim the honor. The one they all celebrated, the lord of the hunt, master of warriors and slayer of the great boar, was that odd lone creature whom everyone called the Wolfcub. To be sure, he was a son of Aurochs the hunter, but he appeared to have no ambition but to hunt alone.

  Then why, Walker demanded of the gods, had he decided to hunt with the pack at this of all times? It was more than inconvenient. It was maddening.

  The gods were not answering. Linden, curse him, would not give way to jealousy or claim the kill for himself. He seemed delighted to honor the boy as they all did, bringing him home in procession, and gaining his father’s leave to call for a feast.

  Well; and that might serve Walker, in its way. People noticed a generous man. A man who claimed only what was due him, who gave honor to those who had earned it . . . yes, that was kingly, too. Walker could make use of it.

  But he would not forget this one who had spoiled his plan for the prince. A boar was a great kill, one of the greatest. A man who killed a boar was a lord of the tribe. Even such a man as this Wolfcub, who heretofore had claimed little and seemed to aspire to less.

  oOo

  Sparrow saw how Walker looked at Wolfcub after he came back from the hunt with the boar’s tusks on his arms and the boar’s hide for a saddlecloth.

  It was not easy to get at Wolfcub. Everyone wanted to sit with him, eat and drink with him, touch him to gain a bit of his luck. Wolfcub did not look as if he minded.

  That woke her temper. It was foolish, she knew perfectly well—did not every young man yearn to be honored so?—but she could not help it. She was used to seeking him out whenever she had a mind, or being sought out as often as not, by someone who walked alone as she did, and cared no more to be noticed.

  Now he was the People’s darling. The king had set him in the place of honor, seen to it that he was fed the best of the feast and the strongest of the kumiss, and offered him a very great honor: his choice of captive women.

  Linden the prince undertook to advise him in that. In too little a while, the two of them had vanished into the king’s tent, to the grand glee of the men at the feast. The king’s laughter followed them, and a blessing with it.

  Sparrow sat in the shadows and simmered. Something was odd in all of this, and she suspected that Wolfcub knew what it was. And he was in the king’s tent, tumbling the king’s women.

  How like a man, after all. How utterly like a man.

  oOo

  Wolfcub had never meant it to go on like this. At first, he tried to tell people that he had not killed the boar, the boar had killed itself. But they would not listen. “That’s your spear in his heart,” Linden said. “Of course you killed him.”

  And that, for the rest of them, was that. None of them seemed the least displeased to give Wolfcub the honor of the hunt. Certainly not Linden, who showed every evidence of delight. He offered his knife for the flaying, and lent a hand with it, too; and he helped Wolfcub free the tusks from the great jaws and slip them onto his arms. They fit almost disturbingly well, holding him in a warm strong clasp, as if they had been a god’s hands.

  He did not feel any stronger or any wiser for having taken that of all lives. The boar’s strength had not entered into him. And yet its power, the potency of its name, had become his. He was the boarslayer. He was a lord of hunters.

  He could let himself be glad of that, since no one minded; no one stooped to envy. The wolf who walked alone was one of the pack after all. That was not so ill a thing, now it had happened. Linden was alive and whole, whatever the shaman might think of that.

  The feast he had expected. To sit by the king—yes, that was the place of honor. But when the king, warm with kumiss and expansive with the rich fat of the boar, gave him the night’s freedom of his own tent, Wolfcub’s first and indeed only impulse was to bolt for the shadows.

  He might well have done it, if Linden had not laughed and said, “Here, brother! I’ll help you. If my father wills?”

  The king smiled indulgently and waved them both away. “Go! Go. Both of you. Don’t let me see your faces till morning.”

  Linden had Wolfcub’s hand before he could prevent it, pulled him up—staggering as the kumiss rushed to his head, but steadier on his feet than he strictly wanted to be—and carried him off to the king’s tent.

  oOo

  Wolfcub had never passed that flap before. When he came with his father to visit the king, the king was always seated outside by the council-fire or taking his ease in the elders’ circle. The tent was his private place, a kingdom of women, and of children too young to be sent to the boys’ tent.

  It was the largest tent in the camp, of course, as was fitting. The floor was covered with the finest tanned leather, and with mats of woven grasses, sweet-scented and pleasant underfoot. The sleeping-furs were of the best, and there were great treasures scattered among them: weapons of rare quality, coats and cloaks beaded and embroidered in patterns as magical as they were beautiful, necklaces of bone and stone and precious shell spread atop baskets of close and intricate weaving, skull-cups inlaid with bright stones and bits of shell, drinking-gourds painted with care and complexity, and, great treasures those, clay pots, some ornamented, some plain, that had come in trade from countries far away.

  There was too much to take in all at once. Wolfcub let it enter his eyes as if he had been on a hunt, to remember later piece by piece, as he chose and as it amused him.

  Now what he chiefly saw were the women who waited by the king’s sleeping-furs. The rest would be hidden away behind a curtain, or perhaps had gone elsewhere for the night. He never had known what women did when men were not thinking of them, nor had he known to care.

  These were the captives, the prizes of battle or raids, whom the king had chosen or who had been allotted him as the best of the booty. They were not all the most beautiful, though none was ill to look on. Some, he knew from rumor, had gifts that served the king: weaving baskets, tanning hides, cooking or singing or, as people whispered, pleasing a man in the sleeping-furs.

  Wolfcub did not know which of them was which. They all stood as women were supposed to stand, eyes lowered, hands folded, submissive. Most were fair or redheaded like women of the People. Two were darker. These came from the south and west, Wolfcub knew, where the little dark people lived; where Sparrow’s mother had come from, taken in war long ago.

  Neither of them had quite her cast of feature. Both were lovely, doe-eyed and soft-cheeked, with full breasts and deep round bellies.

  Wolfcub turned resolutely away from them, and chose almost without a glance, stretching out his hand to a blur of white face and fair hair. “Well chosen!” cried Linden, whose presence Wolfcub had all but forgotten. “Beauty and skill both, and a voice like water running. You’ve a fine eye for a woman, brother.”

  Wolfcub, who had brothers enough, but none of them was this one, held his tongue and made himself look at this paragon of women whose hand had happened to be closest. She was beautiful indeed. She seemed compliant, which the dark women had not. If it troubled her to be given to a callow boy, she did not show it. Maybe he would be a relief from the old man who was her husband, and
the elders to whom she must be given most often as a gift.

  His body had no difficulty in wanting her, whatever his mind did and wherever it wandered. He looked about. The women whom he had not chosen had withdrawn, but Linden was there still, and one of the women, a plump freckled creature with hair as red as fire. She had a bold look, now she was almost alone, and a wicked eye, which she cast on the thing thrusting beneath Wolfcub’s leggings.

  “There now,” said Linden, “be patient. I’ll let you have him—but you have to take me first.”

  The woman laughed. “You’re pretty,” she said in a barbarous accent. “He’s not pretty. But when he grows up—aaahhhh.” She let the sigh go on and on.

  “But I,” said Linden, “am pretty now.” He swept her up in his arms and, to Wolfcub’s considerable relief, carried her off behind one of the curtains that divided the tent. Wolfcub had feared that he would be forced to couple in front of the king’s son—and, perhaps worse, in front of the plump and lecherous woman Linden had chosen.

  But Wolfcub was alone with his own choice, who was not plump and who did not appear to be lecherous, either. Indeed she seemed a cold creature, such a one as suffered a man’s presence but took no pleasure in it.

  Maybe, after all, he should have taken one of the dark women, or the red one. A curtain was little enough barrier, and his ears were keen. Linden was more than pleased with his choice. And his choice was loudly and emphatically pleased with him.

  Wolfcub sighed. If he walked away now, he dishonored the king and insulted the gift. He faced the fair woman. She had not moved since he singled her out: hands folded, eyes downcast. The tunic that she wore was finer than some men’s wives could claim, well-tanned pale leather that caught the pale gold of her hair and made her skin seem even whiter than it was. She wore a necklace of bones and stones and beads, such as a man would trade fine furs for at the gathering of tribes.