Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  No, he thought. That was not so. She might, if she decided it was right and just, take the king’s life with her own hand. But she would never dream of killing the king’s son. Not Linden, whom she had followed about like a forlorn puppy since she was small. Linden was not, that Wolfcub knew, even aware of Sparrow’s existence, but that had never mattered to Sparrow. Sparrow was in love with the king’s empty-headed but undeniably pretty son.

  And Wolfcub was a fool, very probably, for doing her bidding. He did not dislike Linden, at all, but the man was by no means worthy of Sparrow—king’s son or no.

  It was an odd world, Wolfcub reflected as he lay by the dying fire and closed his eyes. He could still see Sparrow’s face. As he gazed at it, he saw again what he had seen when he left her: the white mare at her back, glowing like the moon. It meant something, something important. But before he could grasp it, he had fallen asleep.

  10

  The mare was never satisfied. She wanted Sparrow with her far more often than Sparrow could manage. And it was never safe to be there; if any of the men caught her among the horses, she would be charged with profanation.

  The mare did not know this, or if she knew, she did not care. Sparrow was hers. She wanted Sparrow there, with her, on her back or serving her. She hated it when Sparrow stayed away, as she had to, sometimes for days. Sparrow began to be afraid that the mare would follow her into the camp, and horrify everyone by trying to storm her father’s tent and carry her away. Sometimes Sparrow wished she would do it and get it over. But she never did.

  The nights were the best. Sparrow could slip out then, eluding wakeful children and suspicious wives, and leave the camp, and find the mare grazing in starlight or moonlight. Horses did not sleep as much as humans did, by night or by day. The mare was glad to leave her grazing and take Sparrow on her back and carry her as far as they both had a mind to go.

  More than once they wandered almost till morning. Much more than once, Sparrow slept among the horses, nestled in grass under the stars, with the mare standing guard over her. She never slept as well as she slept then, though she had to rise in the dark before dawn, and hasten back to her father’s tent before anyone knew she was gone.

  When she was with the mare, she dreamed strong dreams, and sometimes terrible; but she never was afraid. The mare stood guard, a white and shining presence, warding her against the dark. She would wake and find that the world without was the same as the world within: the vault of stars, the breathing night, the white mare.

  It was harder and harder to go back to the day’s duties, the women’s pettiness, the men strutting about or lying in their circles, boasting of the things they had done or meant to do, and fancying themselves lords of the world. The real world, the world Sparrow longed to live in, had nothing to do with them at all.

  She had always been apart from them, captive’s child that she was, suffered by her father to live but little regarded past that. Then the dreams had come, that should have belonged to a shaman. And now she belonged to the white mare.

  She began to think things that shocked her, that should have been unthinkable. This was not her tribe. These were not her people. Everything she was, they forbade, because she was a woman. She should go. She should ride away, one of those long starlit nights, and not come back.

  Leave the People? Leave the safety of the tents, the protection of the tribe, even as little as that had ever profited her? Go out alone, forever?

  What of Keen? What of Wolfcub? What of Linden, who had never even noticed she was there, but her world was the brighter for that he was in it? How could she leave them? How could she live all alone in the world? No one did that and survived.

  Even the hunters who went out by themselves always came back. The exiles, the people sent away, all died within the year. Sometimes the People found their starved bodies by the track as they traveled from camp to camp, or hunters came on them far out on the steppe. People were like horses, like wolves. They lived in packs and herds. They did not live alone.

  So then, the spirit in her said. Find a tribe that is yours. Or make one.

  She silenced that dangerous voice, that seductive spirit, but it pursued her wherever she went. It woke her on the rare nights when she slept in the camp, or followed her when she went to the mare. It would not let her be.

  oOo

  She had no thought for what anyone would think of all this, till one morning she stumbled out of her father’s tent, barely awake and still remembering a long ride under the moon. She had been sent to fetch water, but she had forgotten the waterskins. One of the wives pitched them after her, shrilling at her to be quick, and adding nastily, “That is, if you can walk, after all the riding you’ve been doing of nights.”

  Sparrow stopped as if she had been struck. She did not even know who had spoken; it could have been any of the older wives. Someone else laughed and said, “Whatever she’s been riding, it must be a marvel—the smile on her face when she comes staggering home . . . ah, to be so young again!”

  Sparrow did her utmost to still her hammering heart, to overcome the horror that held her rooted. They did not mean horses, or that kind of riding—or she would have been cast in front of the king and the priests, and beaten to death for profaning the herds.

  They thought she had a lover.

  She would have laughed if she had had any breath for it. She unlocked her stiff fingers, bent and picked up the waterskins, and made her way, not too awkwardly, down to the river.

  oOo

  Keen heard what people were saying of Sparrow. At first she laughed and told them to stop talking nonsense. But they insisted. Even sensible people, such as Aurochs’ senior wife, declared that it was true. The shaman’s odd daughter was creeping out at night and running off who knew where, and coming back late or just before dawn, looking both hollow-eyed and deeply satisfied. What else could she be doing but trysting with a lover?

  Certainly people did such things. Some of the unmarried women kept whole herds of young men, concealing them all from fathers and brothers, if never from the women. The young men were not always discreet; sometimes one would get to boasting, and the wrong people would hear, and the woman would pay with her freedom or even her life—or if she had an indulgent father, she would be given to the man who boasted of the conquest, and so end the scandal.

  And yet. . . Sparrow? Keen would never have imagined that Sparrow would creep away to lie with a lover, unless that lover was Linden. And Linden, as everyone knew, was dancing the old dance with Greyling’s red-haired daughter. She was a jealous sort, and wildly beautiful, and had let it be known that she expected her lover to offer half a dozen horses for her at the next gathering of tribes, and so make her an honorable wife. She would have flown into a rage if Linden had been lying with anyone else.

  Not Linden, then, unless he was far more circumspect than Keen would have thought he could be. And not Wolfcub—he was gone on one of his long and solitary hunts. There was no one else among the young men that Keen could think of, who might have drawn Sparrow’s eye, or been inclined toward Sparrow, either.

  One of the older men? Maybe; some of them might actually have eyes to see the beauty in that small dark woman, though Keen rather doubted it. And if any of them had wanted her, he could simply have asked her father for her, and had her for but a token price. Drinks-the-Wind was in no way attached to that one of his daughters.

  Maybe Sparrow was going out to sleep under the stars, that was all, and finding rest by herself that she could not have among her kin. Sparrow had never been afraid of night spirits or the things that walked in the dark. Even when she was small, she had said, “The stars watch over me, and Mother Moon protects me. I’m safe in the night.”

  Keen should be content with that. But people were talking, and Sparrow was taking no notice at all. She had a look about her that warned Keen not to approach, and certainly not to demand an answer to the riddle. Keen had learned long ago to heed that look.

  Keen had also lea
rned how to circle round it. It was not easy. Walker came home every night of late, and wanted his dinner and her body. She was glad to give him both, but would have been content to see him go away again after, chasing his dreams; but he seemed to have decided that the dreams would come, or not, whether he lay in his own tent or on a hilltop under the stars.

  oOo

  On the night of the new moon, at last, Walker stayed away. His time was the dark of the moon, as Drinks-the-Wind’s was the full; he worked his greatest magics then, and performed his strongest rites. And, more to the point, he fasted and denied himself his wife’s body, the better to receive the gods’ messages.

  Keen did not like to be as glad as she was that he would not come to her for three days; perhaps longer if his visions were particularly strong. Time was when she hated every night they were apart, and yearned for him, and barely slept in her cold and solitary bed. But he had been odd of late, abstracted, short-tempered; he was inclined to take her and spend himself in her and turn away before she began to be satisfied.

  Maybe the rite and the visions would calm his spirit and restore the husband she loved. And while they did that, she would see for herself what took Sparrow away from her father’s tent every night.

  Keen had to lie in wait, which she was better at than some of the men might have liked to know: she and Sparrow and Wolfcub had played at being hunters when they were small, and Keen remembered. She settled herself in shadows not far from the elder shaman’s tent, so placed that she could see both the front and the back of it. The camp quieted about her. Some of the men were celebrating a successful hunt, noisily, off by the young men’s place, but here was dark. The camp dogs sniffed about her for a while; she held still, and they went away. Nothing else troubled her but the small things that bit in the night; and she had rubbed herself with a salve that kept most of them away.

  She waited long, so long that she was sure, after all, Sparrow would not go out. Her legs were cramped with sitting, and her back had begun to ache. The night chill crept into her bones.

  Still she waited. Patience, Wolfcub had taught her, was a hunter’s best virtue. “And just when you think the quarry will never come, it does. Then be ready, or it will escape.”

  At first she was barely aware of the flicker in back of the tent, but she was alert; she fixed on it. A shadow had crept out from beneath the painted leather wall, moving so swift and so soft that it was all but imperceptible. But Keen had sharp eyes in the dark.

  She eased to her feet, taking great care not to groan or stumble, and followed the shadow.

  It was quiet and it was quick, but it was not particularly wary. Maybe many nights’ safety had lulled it. It never looked back, nor seemed to know that someone followed in its track.

  It went straight out of the camp, over the long hill and out by a way Keen knew well enough. The herds were there, north of the camp and spreading along a lesser river that flowed to the great one: goats closest, then cattle, and out beyond them, ranging farthest, the horses. In this, the dark of the moon, the priests would be among the stallions, celebrating rites that no woman might see or speak of, but all the women knew of them.

  But the priests were not among the mares, and it was to the mares that the shadow went. Far in among them, fearless and unmolested, to the farthest of them all. To the king-herd, the god-herd, the herd that belonged to the great lord of stallions himself.

  Keen should not have followed, but by then her feet were bound to the track, and her spirit was fixed on the shadow that was, that must be, Sparrow. The horses moved about her, quiet, unalarmed, though a mare snorted warning when she passed too close to a sleeping foal.

  Keen had never gone among the horses before. Some of the girl-children did it, she had heard, but she had always thought that was boasting. Anyone who profaned the horses so could not but be marked by it. Child and woman, she had kept the proper distance, never going closer than she needed in order to gather dung for the fire, and keeping out of the way when the young men rode whooping through the camp, or a horse escaped and ran among the women and children.

  Now she was close enough to touch the sacred hides if she dared, threading her way through big soft-breathing bodies. Their warmth was clearly perceptible. Their smell was sharply familiar. Men brought it back with them from the herds, pungent and rather pleasant.

  She was not afraid. She was past that. No lightning fell from the sky. No priest leaped out of the shadows to strike her down for her transgression.

  She had lost her quarry. But her spirit knew where it had gone. Starlight and night wind told her, and a surety in her bones.

  The white mares, the strange ones, glimmered under the stars. Their dark children moved among them, grazing or dozing or lying in the grass.

  One shadow was smaller than the rest, and moved differently. She saw it clear against a pale and shining shape, then caught her breath: it was on the horse, sitting on its back, turning its face to the stars. The white horse neither reared nor bolted in rage. It stood very still. Its head was up. It was watching Keen.

  There was nowhere to hide. The horses had drawn away as if to expose her. She stood alone on the hilltop.

  The white horse approached her. Sparrow sat on its back, easy as one of the men, which told Keen that this was far from the first time she had ridden the horse. Her face was a pale blur, its expression unreadable.

  Then Sparrow did a strange thing. She held out a hand. Keen took it without thinking. The horse moved. Sparrow pulled. Keen had to do something or fall under the horse’s hooves.

  When the flurry was over, Keen sat, breathing hard, with aching ribs and hammering heart, behind Sparrow on the back of the—mare?

  Mare. Of course it would be. The stallions were all away with the priests. She was broad and warm and terribly alive. And Keen was sitting on her, clinging for dear life to Sparrow’s middle.

  Sparrow pried her grip loose, but let her hold on less strangling-tight. The slight tensing in her body was all the warning Keen had before the mare began to move.

  Later Keen would wonder if that forbidden ride had been, after all, a dream. A woman could dream of riding, though she could never do it, and though she must never tell the men. But to do it—that was beyond any woman’s reach or daring.

  It was as impossible as it was true. She was flying over the grass on the thin edge of panic, with Sparrow in front of her, as calm as if she did this every night—which surely was the truth. Neither of them had spoken a word, nor had the mare made a sound.

  It was a terrible thing they did, a forbidden thing, a violation. It was beautiful. It was glorious.

  Keen could not leap from the mare’s back: she did not dare. That made her a coward, but so be it. Women did not have to be brave as men did. They merely had to be wives, and be obedient, and break no laws. It should not have been difficult. Except that she was here, and breaking one of the great laws of the People, because her friend had done it before her.

  oOo

  They did not ride long by the stars’ turning, though to Keen it was forever. They stopped apart from the herds, with no other horse to be seen, and no human thing, only the steppe and the stars.

  Keen slipped helplessly from the mare’s back. Her knees buckled. She fell and lay in the grass. She was dizzy and sick. Her heart beat so hard, she must surely die.

  And yet after a while she succumbed to a desperate calm. The mare stood over her. Sparrow sat on the white back, gazing down. Keen could not meet those shadowed eyes. “You should have taken a lover,” she said, “as everyone thinks you’ve done. It’s far less deadly than this.”

  “Will you tell them?”

  “No!” The word had been startled out of Keen, but once it was spoken she did not try to call it back. “No, I won’t. But someone will find out. I can’t be the only one who’s curious.”

  “You’re the only one who cares enough to follow.”

  “I’m the first who’s cared to follow.” Keen sat up shakily. Her thi
ghs ached and burned. The earth wanted to surge and swell like a horse’s back. “Why?”

  Sparrow did not play at stupidity. She answered the question as Keen had meant it. “I was given the gift.”

  “By the mare?”

  Sparrow nodded.

  “But—”

  “Do you know,” Sparrow asked, “who first rode a horse? Do you really know? The Grandmother told me before she died. It wasn’t the prince. It was a woman—a girl. The Grandmother. The gift was hers first. Her brother took it from her. Now,” said Sparrow, “Horse Goddess gives it again.”

  Keen shivered. The nature, even the gender of the divinity who dwelt among the horses was a mystery, a secret for the priests to keep. And maybe, she caught herself thinking, they kept it so because they did not want the women to know that it was a goddess, not a god. Female—a mare—not a male.

  Keen did not want to think of it—to believe it, or understand it. Sparrow was fevered; she was trembling. And the words she spoke . . .

  “When the priests find out what you have done,” Keen said, “you’ll pay a terrible price.” Sparrow’s face was set against her, dark eyes hard. Keen regarded it in a kind of despair. Still, she had to say it. “If you stop now, come back, live quietly and stay away from the horses, no one will know. I’ll make sure no one finds out.”

  Of course Sparrow answered, “I can’t do that. The gift is given. This time I won’t let it be taken away.”

  “You may not have a choice.”

  “I never did,” said Sparrow. She stroked the mare’s neck. The mare slanted a narrow ear back at her and made a soft sound, not quite a snort. Sparrow smiled at it.

  That smile struck Keen’s heart. It was a smile of pure love, and pure, blank implacability. “Yes, you chose me. No one can undo the choosing.”

  “The priests will do it,” Keen said, “and the shamans.”

  “They can try.” Sparrow slid from the mare’s back. She stood above Keen, crowned with stars. “They are not the only ones who exact prices. Nor are they the rulers of this world. The gods will have what is theirs, regardless of what men may say.”