Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  Wolfcub might have been able to escape Walker’s notice, but his cousins and kinsmen about Linden marked him before he could fade into the grass. They called to him with glee that had a fair ration of kumiss in it, and would not hear of his leaving them. Linden, shaken out of his contemplation of the silvermaned stallion, favored Wolfcub with his most dazzling smile, a welcome so pure and so perfectly warm that Wolfcub could only sigh and give way to it.

  Wolfcub stood beside Linden’s stallion, where the crowd of them insisted that he be. Linden bent down from the horse’s back and laid an arm about Wolfcub’s shoulders and said, “Look at him now. What do you think?”

  Wolfcub thought that the new king was terribly pretty, terribly young, and terribly foolish. But he could hardly say that to the king’s very image and likeness among men. He said instead, “He’s not going to breed that mare today, unless she has a change of heart.”

  Linden laughed. “I’ll wager he wins her over.”

  “A wager, a wager!” some idiot sang out. “What will you lay on it?”

  “Why,” said Linden, “what’s it worth? A fine bridle, and a skin of kumiss.”

  They were all staring at Wolfcub now, waiting for him to take the wager. He sighed faintly. “A well-tanned deerhide,” he said, “and a skin of kumiss.”

  They cheered at that, and no doubt thought him a great good fellow. Wolfcub wondered why they made him feel so old. He was the same age as they, but his spirit was never so light.

  While he reflected on that, the stallion approached the mare with clear intent to mount her. She squealed in rage and planted both hind feet squarely between his legs. He groaned. She threatened with a restless heel. He slunk off, head and tail low, walking, Wolfcub would have sworn, considerably more spraddle-legged than he had before.

  Linden had roared with the rest at the stallion’s discomfiture. He paid his wager handsomely, and applauded when Wolfcub passed the skin of kumiss round. He was altogether undismayed to have lost his wager.

  He was also, Wolfcub noticed, fixed still, if subtly, on the stallion. That lord of horses recovered soon enough, though he kept his distance from the mares. Linden watched him steadily, perhaps not even aware that he had done it.

  17

  When all the tribes of the plain had gathered by the river near the sacred place, three days before the ninefold sacrifice began, the king of the White Stone People went out to tame the new king of stallions. He had prepared himself with fasting and honed himself in the dance, leaping and whirling and stamping by firelight, naked and painted with signs of power. Then he had gone into his tent and prepared himself in another way, lying with the chosen of his women—it was Fawn, the women said to one another, and certain of his other women had not taken it well at all.

  Women could not watch this rite of taming the stallion. They were kept in the tents as they would be for the sacrifices, shut away lest their eyes and their presence pollute the rite.

  But Sparrow could not stay away from it. She would far rather have gone out onto the open plain than confined herself in close and reeking dimness with women who did nothing but bicker among themselves, play endless games of toss-the-bones, and drink far more kumiss than their men would have been pleased to know of.

  Indeed she would have done that as she had in years past. But in the morning when the women were ordered into the tents, she woke from a dream of the mare. The mare was calling her urgently, demanding her presence at once.

  She tried to resist it. She banked the fire in front of her father’s tent. She herded the youngest children within. She gathered such oddments as they all might need for confinement.

  But the calling would not stop for that. When she tried to enter the tent, her body turned instead and slipped away, concealing itself as best it could till it had passed the camp and found the safety of the plain.

  oOo

  The mare was waiting for her, pawing with impatience. Sparrow could not tell her that any woman’s presence at this rite would profane it. The mare cared nothing for men’s laws. Sparrow would come. That was her will.

  Sparrow went, because Horse Goddess would not have it otherwise. She was allowed at least to go in hunter’s wise, and to conceal herself in the tall grasses above the field of the trial. It was a hollow in the earth like the print of a vast hoof, somewhat steep-sided, smooth and almost level within. The men were gathered there, all those of the White Stone and as many of the other tribes as were minded to come. They perched on the hillside and stood or crouched on the edges of the circle. They were utterly, preternaturally still.

  The priests had brought the silvermaned king to the circle. He was not at all pleased to have been roped and bound and dragged apart from his mares. But the priests were many and their ropes were strong. In the end he submitted.

  The king of the White Stone People stood near the eastward edge of the circle, the morning side, waiting for the stallion to cease his fighting of the ropes. He was stripped to the waist, baring strong shoulders and corded arms, and a rich array of scars amid the king-marks swirling on breast and back. He was barefoot, his leggings plain, no weapon on him. In his hand he held a rope of braided hide.

  The stallion stood quiet for a long moment. He might have erupted again, but the mare snorted gently behind Sparrow. Sparrow tensed to dive for cover, but no one seemed to have heard, except the stallion. He lifted his head and flared his nostrils but held still.

  In the silence Sparrow scanned as many faces as she could see. There were the priests in their masks of featureless horsehide. There was a cluster of shamans, and her father tall among them, with his flowing beard and his heavy white braids. Her brother she did not see.

  No—there. Not far from the king, standing beside Linden, arms folded, wearing no expression at all.

  Linden was oblivious to the shaman’s presence. He was intent not on the king but on the stallion. Sparrow wondered that people did not remark on the yearning in his eyes.

  But the silvermaned stallion belonged to his father. He had to stand unmoving while the king gestured to the priests. They hesitated for a breath’s span, but his command was clear. They slipped the ropes that bound the stallion, all but one, which the last of the priests handed, with a bow of his mane-crowned head, to the king.

  The stallion had not moved while he was freed. Nor did he move when he felt a new hand on the rope. He was alert but quiet, ears flicking nervously, soft black nostrils fluttering.

  The king approached him slowly. That at least the stallion could bear: he had had men about him since he was a foal, and a woman, too. Sparrow had gentled him when he was small, and taught him to seek the touch of a hand.

  So he did now, to the manifest awe of those who watched. He approached the king delicately, one step, two; he lowered his nose into the king’s hand. The king ventured to touch his head, his ears. He shied only a little.

  Was the king relieved? Sparrow could not tell. Swiftly but carefully he fashioned his rope into a bridle and slipped it over the stallion’s head. The stallion tensed but steadied. The king stroked along his neck and shoulders, back and flanks. He barely quivered.

  With sudden decision, the king sprang onto the stallion’s back.

  Sparrow tasted blood. She had bitten her tongue—it hurt appallingly. But better that than a cry of outrage. Fool! Had he no patience?

  The stallion stood stunned under that imposing weight. The king clamped legs about his barrel. Fool, again; fool and thrice fool. The stallion, appalled, went up.

  Straight up, lunging for the sky. There could be no thought in that lovely head but to be rid of the clutching, clamping thing. When it hauled at his head, forcing it about, driving him down to the earth, he flung up his heels in revolt.

  Still the king clung to his back. He bucked furiously. The king only laughed.

  Sparrow did not see exactly what it was that sent the stallion into another paroxysm of revolt. The king was riding more lightly now. The stallion was growing calm again, begin
ning—she thought—to accept this burden on his back. He was not evil of mind or spirit; he quite lacked the wits to lull his rider into complacency and then fling him off.

  And yet from almost-quiet he burst into sudden, spinning, bucking fury. The king’s laughter rang out anew. Round the edges of the circle men began to cheer, stamping their feet, clapping their hands in salute.

  Maybe that was more than the stallion could bear. Maybe something stung him. A bee—a dart? His bucking gained a frantic edge. He twisted, flinging himself up, then down, over and over.

  The king held on. But he was tiring. Maybe there was more to it; maybe someone had laid a wishing on him. One moment he was riding well enough, holding fast to mane and sides. The next, he spun through the air.

  He seemed to hang there for a long, long while, many counts of breath, many beats of the heart. Then slowly, oh so slowly, he fell.

  Sparrow saw how he would go. He should have gathered himself, drawn into a knot, rolled free. But he fell limply, all asprawl. His head struck the earth first.

  People were still clapping and chanting, as if their eyes had run far ahead of their bodies. Sparrow heard no sound of body striking ground. Nonetheless she could have sworn before the gods that she heard the soft, distinct snap of his neck.

  oOo

  Silence, when at last it fell, was profoundly blessed. The stallion had fled still bucking to the far side of the circle, as far from—yes, as far from Walker and as near to the mare as he might go. There perhaps he would have regained his wonted calm; but the men there, no less fools than the king, broke the bonds of the circle to surge toward him. He veered snorting and plunged back the way he had come.

  The king lay where he had fallen. He was limp, a broken thing. The priests ran to him, and some of the shamans. First to reach him was Drinks-the-Wind, his old friend and battle-brother. Even from a distance Sparrow could see her father’s face, how still it was, how starkly white—nigh as white as the fall of his beard.

  The stallion, mad now with all the people closing in on him, bolted straight for the king and the kneeling shaman. None of all these men, horsemen though they claimed to be, had the wits to understand that if they had kept their places, the stallion would have settled to grazing well away from the fallen king.

  A lone figure darted out from the crowd. Its yellow plaits streamed behind as it ran. Linden, by luck or fate or the gift of the gods, caught the stallion’s rein as it whipped past, sprang, got a grip on mane, flew onto the stallion’s back.

  He was mad, but so was the stallion—mad with running, not with bucking and plunging. And Linden let him do it. He did not clamp or clutch as the king had. He sat as quietly as a man could on the back of a horse bolting wildly in a ceaseless circle, darting aside from men who stumbled into his path, and no thought in his head but to run and run and run. Linden gripped mane and loosened rein, crouched down and let him run himself out.

  It had dawned on the crowding men, slowly but inevitably, what Linden was doing—what he had done. They drew back out of his way. They settled in their old places, more or less, in their old silence. They watched.

  The priests and the shamans too had seen it, first in avoiding the stallion’s flying hooves, then in marking who rode on his back. All but Drinks-the-Wind, who was intent on the fallen king.

  He did what he could. He straightened the tumbled limbs, and the head awry on the broken neck. He closed the staring eyes. He sang a death-song over the body, while the stallion, the kingslayer, galloped round the circle.

  Nine times the stallion ran that great circle. Sparrow counted. Then at last near the fallen king, he pounded to a halt. That was Linden’s hand on the rein and his weight on the young back, breaking through the fog of fear and speed. The stallion stood breathing hard, foam on his neck and between his hindlegs, but he was far from spent: he could still raise his head and snort at the dead thing in front of him.

  Linden gentled him with a hand, stroking his sweat-streaming shoulder. It was a gesture altogether without thought, a horseman’s gesture. The stallion settled somewhat to it, and consented to walk a slow and much smaller circle, till his breathing quieted and the sweat began to dry on his neck.

  Linden, alone of all of them, did not seem to know what he had done. He had calmed a frightened horse, that was all, and taught him to carry a rider, so that he would not imagine that he could cast off any man who sat on his back. There were tears streaming down Linden’s face, grief for the king his father—but no thought, Sparrow was sure, of the consequence of his fine horsemanship. The king of stallions had cast off and killed the king of men. The king’s heir, his favorite son, had mounted the stallion and tamed him, and rode him as horses were to be ridden, as both lord and servant.

  The king was dead. The king lived, mounted on the back of the silvermaned stallion.

  Sparrow looked beyond Linden to the place where Walker had been standing. Where he still stood, scrupulously out of the way, and for a while forgotten. He was smiling with great satisfaction. There was no sign about him of a dart, but Sparrow did not expect to find one. A shaman’s tunic was capacious and full of secrets.

  But Sparrow knew. It was as clear in him as if he had shouted it to the sky. Walker had the king he wanted. The rest, he was certain, would follow.

  18

  The king of the White Stone People was dead. The new king rode into the gathering on the back of the young king of stallions, and the priests paced behind, bearing the old king on a bier of spears and war-cloaks. Word had come to the camp already, as swift as such things always were. The women streamed out of the tents, wailing and rending their garments. Camp dogs barked and snarled, shrieking as they did battle with one another, or as men kicked or beat them out of the way.

  The noise was indescribable. It brought Keen out of Aurochs’ tent where she had been invited to spend the day with Willow and the lesser wives. It rent a cry out of her as if her body were not her own, a long shrilling lament that went on and on without her willing it. They were all doing it, all possessed by the grief and shock of a king’s death.

  But even as the wailing poured from lungs and throat, her eyes marked Linden on the stallion’s back, and Walker close behind him. Everyone else was fixed on the king or on the old shaman who walked beside him. But Walker, no. Walker looked like a father whose son has tamed his first stallion.

  There was no evident evil in it, no malice, only joyful pride. Yet Keen’s shoulders tightened. She had never looked at her husband so before—as if he were a stranger. And one, moreover, whom she did not particularly like or trust.

  Was this how Sparrow saw her brother? Sparrow had no love at all for Walker, Keen knew that. Keen had never understood why, until now. And for no reason, either, nor for any provocation. Walker had done nothing to her. He had not even seen her since she came back to the People.

  Maybe that was why. She was healed inside, but there were scars. She wanted, needed, his warmth, his touch to assure her that she was beautiful, his kisses to remind her that she was cherished. She needed—maybe not to make another child, not so soon, but to know that she could. That they would together, and this time, gods willing, it would live.

  But he had never even noticed that she was missing, nor come to look for her, nor cared to discover what had become of her. Aurochs’ young wife Teasel had muttered just now, before the clamor brought them out, that it was little wonder Keen had not seen him; he was always in the Tall Grass camp, ingratiating himself with its shaman and exchanging heated glances with the shaman’s red-haired daughter. Keen would have wanted to know more—would have demanded it—but then the kings had come back, the living and the dead, and everything was lost in that.

  oOo

  A king could not be buried at once as a simple man could, still less thrust into the ground and forgotten like a woman. Because this one had died so close to the great sacrifices, he was laid on his bier before the altar-stone in the sacred place, with guards to keep off the vultures, and pr
iests and shamans wreathing him about with prayer and chanting and pungent smoke. His sons were among the guards, and some among the priests, all gathered as was proper for their father’s farewell.

  All but Linden. He was taken away into a place so secret that the women were not allowed to speak of it, though they all knew somewhat of it. It was an old tomb, the grave of a king so ancient his name was long since lost, who some thought might even have been a god. The young king must go down into the earth, into the heart of the tomb, and there lie in the dark, and lay himself open to gods and visions. Three days he would lie there, and at moonrise of the third, come forth as if born into the world again. Then he would be made a king before the tribes.

  It was a great thing, everyone reckoned, that Linden would come out of the tomb on the morning before the first sacrifice. It was an omen. It foretold mighty things for him as king, that he had taken his place in so sacred a season, before the whole of the gathered people.

  The women had much to do to prepare for what would be a greater feast than they had reckoned on. Hunters went out far and wide to bring back meat for the feast. It had to be skinned, cleaned, readied for the fires or the spits or the cookpots. Young girls and women free of other duties were kept busy all day long gathering dung to feed the fires and seeking out herbs and roots, greens and the seeds of the wild grasses; fishing in the river; and hunting the honeycomb.

  Only the king’s women did no such thing. They secluded themselves in the tent that had been his, making his funeral garments and preparing for their own fate. The wives would go into the tomb with him. The concubines would go to the new king.

  oOo

  No one was allowed to visit them or to console them. “They’re afraid we’ll talk sense into them,” Sparrow said as she and Keen and some of the other young women went berry-gathering, the day before the king’s burial.

  Keen was not exactly shocked. Sparrow always said such things, though she was usually more careful as to where she said them. “Sometimes,” Keen said to her, pausing in stripping a bramble of its sweet red burden, “I think you’d argue with a god if he said something you didn’t agree with.”