by Judith Tarr
“You’re mad,” Keen whispered.
“I may be,” Sparrow said. “But if I am, so is this mare. And so is Horse Goddess.” She held out her hand. “Come, up. Let’s go home.”
Keen let herself be pulled to her feet. Mercifully, Sparrow did not force her onto the mare’s back. They walked instead, a remarkably little distance—for, however long they had ridden, they had come back just over the hill from the camp.
The mare followed as far as the hill, but as they climbed it, she wheeled and snorted and leaped into a gallop. She was returning to her herd, Keen thought, as the women returned to theirs.
11
The earth was empty of magic. The sky was silent. Even the voice of the wind was still.
Walker sat on a far hilltop, naked to the sky, empty with fasting. He was all open, all bare to the gods, but the gods had nothing to say to him. Not even a bird flew, to offer him an omen.
He had sat on that hilltop for a hand of days past the time of the new moon. He had sung till his voice was gone, danced till his feet were raw. He had called on the spirits one by one and each by name: the spirits of earth and air, the ghosts of his ancestors, the great ones who walked in darkness and the greater ones who walked in the light. Not one had answered his call.
Such silences had befallen him before. The spirits did as they pleased, and magic was not a tamed thing. And yet, like Sparrow’s recent refusal to give him her visions, this had a tang of malice in it. They knew what he needed. They were not inclined to give it.
One more full moon. Then, in the moon’s dark, the ninth year began. The People would gather some days’ journey south of this camp. They would sing and dance and worship the gods, make marriages, make alliances, and—if it went as he hoped—make a king.
For that, he needed a vision, an omen. The source of his visions would give him nothing. Now, it seemed, the source of his omens was equally contrary.
A small, small part of him whispered that perhaps the silence was his answer. But he would not accept that. He was the great shaman, the prophet, the seer of the People. He would have his omen. He would have his vision, too. He would have everything. This was a test, that was all. He would pass that test, and his power would be all the greater for it.
He rose. Naked but for the sacred signs painted in ocher on brow and breast, and the amulets plaited into his hair and wound about his neck and arms and middle, he walked where his feet led him. They took him over the hill and down a narrow valley to a broad flat plain.
It was full of horses. The herds had moved while he kept his vigil, shifting east and somewhat north. They would advance soon, he knew, toward the great grazing grounds where all the herds gathered in summer, the plain as wide as a world and well-watered with rivers both great and small.
The herds knew it was time. Did they also know it was a ninth year? Walker’s feet took him to a hill that overlooked the plain, and let him sit there as he had sat on that other hill.
The herds grazed below him. They kept to their own clans and tribes, with spaces between. The stallions paced, wary, defending their bands of mares.
There were a great number of foals this year, many and many small gamboling shapes amid the larger, quieter ones. Last year’s foals, the yearlings with their rough coats and big bellies and raw half-grown look, prowled the edges, much set upon by both the mares and the roving bands of young stallions.
Walker saw the priests among the horses, naked men wearing the skulls and maned hides of stallions. The rite had begun, then, the invocation of the king stallion, bidding him lead them to the summer gathering.
It was silent as yet, the men standing or crouching on the edges of the herds, watching as Walker watched. They would be looking to see if the king would give them a sign.
He grazed among his mares, oblivious to the men. One of the mares had foaled not long ago, perhaps even this morning. She grazed closest, keeping herself between the tiny stumbling foal and the king, but making it clear that she sought his protection.
She was one of the royal band, the strange ones, the white mares. The foal was dark as all that kind were. It wobbled about as newborns did, exploring this world into which its mother had brought it.
The king took no notice of the foal, but he did not drive off the mare. He was a glorious creature, golden dun, with a heavy mane and a tail that dragged the ground. The scars of battle, wars of both men and horses, were thick on him, and his back had begun to weaken with age, but he was the king, the lord of the world. Perhaps he fancied himself immortal.
The young stallions had moved in close to the royal mares, not so near as to seem presumptuous, but one of the mares on the edge was in her foal-heat, and wanton with it. Sometimes the king would allow a lesser stallion to cover such a mare, if it suited his whim.
The young stallions knew it. Those in the lead flared their nostrils and arched their necks. Their rods were rampant, thick and long as a woman’s arm. Those behind tumbled and nipped and intermittently fought. Too timid to press to the front, they squabbled among themselves, finding excuses to do battle: a choice bit of grass, a stinging fly, a fellow who came too close and must be driven back.
Of the stallions who led the band, two were known to contend for mastery. One was a dun, a son of the king. The other was young to stand so high. He had been born in the spring after the grey mares came to the herds; his dam had been in foal before the king ever saw her. He was dark, black indeed, but dappled silver. His mane was bright silver, and his tail streaming behind, bright as moon on snow. His beauty was very great, and well he knew it. He put Walker in mind of Linden.
He left the herd of his fellows. The mare was visibly apart from her own herd now, grazing with great nonchalance, but her tail was high. She had turned so that the wind wafted her scent toward the stallions. She was a wanton one, to be sure, even ignoring her foal who had wandered off with another of the mares and her rather older offspring.
The silvermaned stallion approached her delicately, lifting each foot and setting it down with mincing precision. He was at his most beautiful, neck arched, nostrils flared, tail curled over back.
When he was still a little distance from her, he began to dance. He lifted and floated over the grass. He halted, wheeled, curvetted. He snorted and launched himself into the air, kicking exuberantly. He came down in a lofty, prancing trot, circling her, showing her every side and facet of his beauty.
She had raised her head at his approach. Her ears flicked back, then pricked sharply forward. Her tail rose even higher, as her rump lowered. But when he moved toward it, she squealed and struck with vicious swiftness.
He retreated rapidly, snorting. The mare stood still. He approached with great caution, stretched his neck out as far as it would go, touched noses.
She squealed and struck again, but coyly. He held his ground until she had quieted once more. Then, tentatively, he ventured to nibble her cheek.
She would squeal again, of course, and upbraid him for presumption, but permit successively greater liberties until she had allowed him to mount her. But the king had taken notice at last of the interloper. He abandoned his lady and her foal. He roared through the herd, ears flat, long yellow teeth bared.
The young stallion was a beauty, but—unlike Linden—he was no fool. He had known what price he might pay for so enticing a mare. As the king charged toward him, he set himself between the king and the mare, and braced.
The king was tall and broad. He was aging but strong. The silvermaned stallion was taller and suitably broad, but he was young. He had yet to reach his full strength. The few fights he had fought were small ones, or he would have boasted greater scars; and he had won none of them, else he would have ruled a band of mares.
The king had been king for nine years. He was wise, and crafty in battle. Just before he would have struck the young one with his body, he veered.
The silvermaned stallion stumbled off balance. The king lunged. He caught the silvermane on the shoulder.
The king’s trumpet of rage died to a gurgle. Blood sprayed. The silvermane held on, tenacious as a wolf on its prey. The king battered him with frantic hooves, but he eluded them. He thrust his weight against that massive body, teeth still sunk in its throat, and cast it to the ground.
It fell with force that Walker felt on his hill. The silvermane stood over the king. His mouth was bloody. He was eating of his enemy’s flesh—ears flat back, lips wrinkled in disgust, but chewing and swallowing. He had, in the way of magic, devoured his rival. He had taken the power into himself.
So did a warrior do among men, in the madness of battle. So did a king of men do when he conquered an enemy.
The silvermane stood over the fallen king of horses. The king was still alive: legs thrashing, head tossing, though his throat was bitten out. The silvermane reared on his hindlegs, poised, came crashing down, full on the king’s skull.
The king of stallions was dead. The new king trumpeted, pealing his victory. He danced about the fallen body, prancing and curvetting, but once he had crushed its skull, he did not violate it further.
The herds, even the king’s herd, seemed strangely unmoved. The lesser stallions kept to their places, guarding their mares. The royal mares went on with their grazing, except the one whom the silvermane had won. She beat him off when he approached, would have none of him.
But he was young and proud and full of his triumph. He persevered. At last she suffered him to touch her, nuzzle her, offer her a mouthful of choicest grass and a single white flower.
She ate the grass, spat out the flower. He nuzzled her nape. She curled her tail over her back, and staled in the grass as mares will, tormenting him with her scent.
Without warning he mounted her. She squealed, but softly, bracing to take the weight of him. He fumbled about, both fierce and awkward; then suddenly, with a grunt as if of surprise, found his target.
He bred her well, in the way of stallions, and long, which was not common. When he was done, he slipped from her and nigh fainted in the grass. She danced about him, eager still, calling to him, beckoning, bidding him serve her again.
One of the other young stallions slipped close, hoping perhaps to take advantage of his fellow’s exhaustion. But the silvermane had a little strength left. He lunged. The other fled in great disorder.
No one else undertook to challenge the new lord of the royal herd. As the day went on, he bred such others of the mares as were in season, and bred the first of them again, with strength that Walker, watching, found remarkable. In that way he laid claim to all the mares, and they accepted his right to rule them.
None, even the old mare who led them, troubled to drive him off. They did not mourn their fallen king, nor resent the young interloper.
Walker had his sign. It was the greatest that he could have wished for, and the surest. What he would do among the People, the gods had done in the royal herd. The king was dead. The young king ruled.
This young king had no ally, no shaman to aid him—unless it were Walker’s presence, and his prayer for a sign, that had won him his tide.
Yes, Walker thought. His prayer had done this. Just as it would aid Linden—and among the People he could do far more, and more strongly, than he had done among the horses. Come the ninth-year feast, Linden would be king, mounted on the king stallion. Walker would make sure of it.
12
Late in the day on which the king stallion died and a young upstart took his place, Wolfcub came back to the camp with his father. The People were in great disarray. For such a thing to happen so close to the gathering of tribes, and in a ninth year besides, seemed to them a terrible omen.
The king in particular was grey with shock. The conquered king had been his companion, his mount in war and on the march from camp to camp, and the great sign and seal of his kingship. Now a stranger ruled the herds, a stallion who did not know the king, nor was there time to tame him before the tribe must move.
Or so the king said. Certain of the young men declared, and none too quietly either, that a true man needed but a rope of braided hide, a morning’s span, and his own courage to tame a stallion. They seemed not to understand or to care what a king was, or how a king stallion was made.
While the men strutted and came close to quarrelling, and the king sat in his circle with that white and stricken face, the priests flayed and gutted the carcass of the fallen stallion and brought it back in procession to the camp’s center. The women hid themselves away lest their eyes profane the rite. Especially they must not see the great and broken head raised on a spear, with its torn throat and crushed skull, but royal still, and somehow terrible.
That night they ate the flesh of the stallion, cracked his bones and offered the sweet marrow to the gods, and set the king upon his hide. The hide on which the king had sat, the hide of the great sacrifice that came in the gathering of tribes, they wrapped about the broken bones and buried in a secret place, with the skull set on it, and words of power laid over it. Then they feasted till daybreak, all the men of the People, with a kind of grim abandon.
oOo
Wolfcub had fretted at his father’s slowness in coming back to the People. First it had rained in torrents, and they had waited out the day in such shelter as they could muster. Then they met a hunting party of the Black Rock People, allies and kin of their own tribe, and brewers of a sour but potent spirit from the wild barley.
These hunters had pressed them to hunt a rogue lion that had been stalking their herds. Aurochs could hardly refuse, for his pride as a hunter and for generosity toward a tribe in need.
The hunt was quick, which was a mercy, and the kill clean, with no men badly wounded, and the lion dead with Aurochs’ spear in its heart. Then of course Aurochs must be feasted and praised in the Black Rock camp, given great gifts and offered the pick of the women, and for courtesy he had to accept it all, or do dishonor to the people and their king.
And all the while, Wolfcub fretted, twitching with urgency that grew as the days crawled past. No wonder, either, with what they came back to: a thing that had never happened before, a king conquered out of season and a young stallion raised in his place. Nor was it any of the lesser kings and herdmasters, but one of the wandering band of mareless stallions—such a young creature as Wolfcub himself was, without wife or wealth, rank or standing among his people.
“He’ll fall,” Spearhead said by the young men’s fire, after the youngest men had eaten their small portion of the king’s flesh and dived into a large skin of kumiss. “He had a stroke of luck, or the gods were in the mood for play. But once the older stallions get over the shock, they’ll challenge him. One of them will bring him down and make himself king.”
“That’s what the old men say,” said Linden. As the king’s favored son, he could have sat in the king’s circle, but he had chosen, for whatever reason, to settle among the men of his own age. Most of his usual companions lounged about, taking more than their share of the kumiss, but neither Linden nor any of the others made an effort to stop them.
Linden was in a splendid mood—one of the few who truly was. Nearly everyone else felt a bleakness in the heart of him, a cold knot of fear. This kingmaking was not natural. It was out of season, and the king who had risen was not the one who should have done it. But Linden was in high good humor, drinking rather lightly of the kumiss but conducting himself as if every drop of it had gone to his head.
“What if,” he said, “he doesn’t fall? What if the gods are with him, and he holds his place and rules as king? What will all the old men say then?”
“Why,” said one of his followers out of the shadows, in a voice too slurred with drink to set a name to, “that they always knew he had it
in him!”
Linden laughed. Others echoed him. But most of those about were somber. Spearhead said, “This is not a good thing. I heard someone wonder if it might be the work of an ill spirit or a sorcerer, to throw us into discord before the gathering. Not everyone is glad to call our king the king of kings.”
“But any king may challenge,” Linden pointed out, “and if he wins the fight, the power is his. Why would anyone enchant our king stallion to his death?”
“To weaken our king,” Spearhead said. “To gain the upper hand.”
“But a king who did that would do it at the gathering,” said Linden. “Not here, at this odd time. No; I think the gods did it, or else it simply happened. Horses do what they will do. They care little enough for the wants of men.”
Now that, thought Wolfcub, was manifestly true, and rather profound for Linden. Wolfcub had not drunk much kumiss, he did not think, but his head was light. He had an urge to say something, anything, that would shock everyone who could hear it. But the one thing he could think of, which was that he thought he knew who had done this thing, was more shocking even than he could bear to set in words.
He had seen Walker with the elder shaman, standing in the king’s circle. Drinks-the-Wind looked as taken aback as the king, and as much at a loss. Walker wore a grim expression and precious little else—for he had been on the steppe, fasting and praying, when the stallions fought—but Wolfcub could see in him no shock. No horror. If he had not brought this about, he had welcomed it. Wolfcub was almost sure of that.
It was of a piece with his sending Linden to the old boar’s kingdom and bidding him do insult to the boar and his wives. Walker had sent a message to any who could understand it. He had it in his mind to make a king.
Who that king would be, Wolfcub was not absolutely certain. It well might be Linden. But if Linden proved weak, or failed, surely Walker had another prospect in mind—one who likewise was both handsome and biddable.
