Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  “Beautiful,” said one of the others. He did not look to see who it was. He was too preoccupied with the thing that had struck him, that he had not seen before. His mother was so small. Or—was he grown so tall?

  “You are a handsome thing,” she said, “after all. Who’d have thought it?” She brushed at his coat, which was perfectly clean and had not a wrinkle in it, and fussed with his braids till she was satisfied, then thrust him out with little ceremony into the first pale glimmers of sunlight.

  People stared at him as he walked through the camp toward the place where he had been told to go, where he could see the others waiting with horses and a company of priests. He held himself straight, though he would have liked to turn hunter, sink down and seek shadows and pass unnoticed.

  A king’s companion should not do that. He walked in the light, with pride and in such beauty as he had—however great or little that might be.

  The women seemed to think he had a fair store of it. It had never mattered before, but with the rest, it made him stand taller.

  oOo

  The others were all gathered when he came there, Spearhead coming next to last and just ahead of him. Boys had caught and readied their horses for them, brushing even Wolfcub’s dun to such sheen as he ever had, and working the tangles out of the rough black mane. He was nearly handsome in his slabsided way, and very full of himself, too.

  Two of a kind, they were—Wolfcub could almost hear Sparrow’s voice saying it. He grinned and slapped the stallion’s neck and swung astride.

  None of them was finding it easy to mourn the fallen king. He had been both high and remote, closer to gods than to the hearts of the young men. This new king whom they went to greet—he was their friend, their kinsman and their battle-brother.

  They milled about for a bit without direction, while the priests sat quiet and faceless on their horses. Wolfcub took his pattern from that; he kept his mount still and waited.

  A priest came toward them on foot from among the herds. He led the king of stallions, brushed and scrubbed until he gleamed, in a fine braided bridle, with a soft doeskin flung over his back. The priest led him up to Wolfcub and held out the rein.

  Wolfcub took it blindly. This was the great honor, the one the others had been vying for: to take the stallion to his king. He caught Bullcalf’s scowl and Spearhead’s shrug. None of them contested the choice. “Boarslayer,” someone said, almost too soft to hear. It was both title and explanation.

  They formed in ranks then, priests ahead and behind, the pack of companions in the middle, and Wolfcub the last of them, leading the silvermaned stallion. He was skittish but not unreasonably so; Wolfcub gentled him with soft words, drawing the stallion’s head toward his knee. His own horse, sensible beast that he was, flattened an ear but offered no other threat. The stallion took comfort from that, maybe. He followed docilely enough.

  It was not a long way to the holy place, but they took it slowly, in processional. The priests chanted as they rode. One of them had a drum on which he beat, stroke and stroke.

  Walker Between the Worlds waited for them in the shadow of the barrow, with a handful of shamans for escort. And it was an escort, just as the companions would escort the new king. Walker stood tallest of them all, with his winter beauty and his arrogant lift of the head, which he had from his father. He was shaman born of a race of shamans, wielder of powers beyond the reach of simple men, and well he knew it.

  The silvermaned stallion snorted wetly at him. Wolfcub bit his lip. Horses cared little for men’s pretensions to power.

  Walker did not seem to understand that the stallion had been expressing an opinion. He was deep in the importance of his position, opening the door into the underworld, letting in the sun, and calling out in a splendid and carrying voice: “Come forth! Come forth and be reborn.”

  There was a long, breathless pause. In it, the companions glanced at one another. Some of them had begun to be afraid. What if Linden was dead? What if he had gone mad? Or worse—what if the gods had rejected him?

  A scrabbling broke the silence: the sound of a footstep on rough and sloping ground. A figure strode out of the darkness into the dazzle of morning light. He stood squinting through tears of pain, erect and still under the sky, finding his balance and his vision.

  Walker took his hands. He peered at the shaman. He did not look mad, and he was certainly not dead. He smiled, and that was purely Linden. “Walker,” he said. His voice was rough with dryness, or perhaps disuse. “Is it time?”

  Walker nodded. “It is time. What did you see?”

  Linden frowned. Whatever his days in the dark had done for him, they had not granted him any quickness of wit. “I saw dark,” he said. “I smelled dust and old stone. The king is down there still. He lies on the stone. His bed—it was flowers. Long dead and gone to dust, but I smelled the ghosts of them. They were the only ghosts that came to me. Do you know what I thought, Walker? I thought, that’s no king. That’s a woman. They laid her to rest in a bank of flowers.”

  One of the companions snorted as if to stifle laughter. No one else dared move or speak. Wolfcub wondered if any of them began to regret this lovely idiot who would, by the gods’ will, be their king.

  Walker betrayed neither anger nor dismay. He answered gravely, as if Linden had been speaking sense. “My lord, that is an odd vision. Most odd indeed. And did you dream?”

  “I think so,” Linden said. “The air was full of flowers. There was a woman. She looked like the old people, little and dark, but very beautiful. She came to me and we did what man and woman do. She never spoke. When she left me . . . she turned into a mare. A white mare. Then—” He faltered.

  “Then?” Walker prompted him.

  His brows knit; he shook his head. “I don’t remember. It seems the flowers all turned to arrows. And there—there were women riding on horses. They had bows and spears. I woke up then, because it was so preposterous. I didn’t want to dream it any more.”

  Walker would have been glad not to hear it, either, Wolfcub thought. But he mastered himself before he spoke. “This dream is most strange—but much of it, surely, is no more than a dream. I see nothing in it that bodes ill for you. Indeed,” he said, and his voice swelled richly and filled with deep music, “while you were communing with the gods, they came to me in this outer place and showed me wonders: a field of stars, and all of them singing your name. Great and glorious king, they called you, lord of warriors, mightiest of the People. They foretold for you a great kingship and a glorious reign.”

  That was far more to the taste of those who listened. Linden most of all—he drew up taller as Walker spoke, and his eyes shone. “Truly? Truly you saw that?”

  “As truly,” Walker said, “as I am a shaman.”

  “The king’s shaman.” Linden freed his hands from Walker’s to rest them on the shaman’s shoulders. “Walk with me. Stand beside me while I lay my father to his rest. Be my guide and guardian. Will you do that? Will you serve me as the gods allow?”

  “As the gods allow,” said Walker, “I will be your shaman.”

  Linden’s joy was as bright as the sun, and as free of guile. He would not have heard what Wolfcub had: that Walker would be his shaman, but he said nothing of service. “Splendid! Oh, splendid. But first,” he said, sobering as much as he ever could, “we have to bury my father.”

  Walker inclined his head—acquiescing, it might have seemed. But to Wolfcub’s eye, it seemed almost as if he granted his leave; as if he allowed the king to command him.

  oOo

  As the young king had been brought forth in the morning, so was the old king laid to rest in the evening. The sun was setting as Linden came with his companions and his shaman to the sacred circle within the White Stone camp, where the priests and all the people and the elder shaman waited for him.

  He was beautiful, riding on his black-and-silver stallion, with his bright hair gleaming and his fine open face all pale with grief. He mourned his father, however l
ittle it seemed to matter to anyone else that the old king was dead. He slipped from the stallion’s back to kneel by the bier, taking no apparent notice of the reek of death that the priests’ efforts had failed to keep at bay. He murmured a few words—far too faint for Sparrow to hear, crowded back among the women. It was miracle enough that she could see him: and that was by virtue of a convenient stone, and no men nearby to tower over her.

  He bade farewell to his father and commended the old king’s spirit to the gods. After a while he rose. At that signal, priests of the Stallion lifted the bier on bare strong shoulders, their faceless masks and tall maned crests making them seem like creatures out of the otherworld, spirits come to walk among men.

  They all went to the place of burial, a long winding march, all but the young king on foot, treading earth as the people of the plain had done since the dawn time. Women wailed and beat their breasts. The more extravagant rent garments and tore hair, whirling and spinning as they shrieked.

  The men walked silent, their faces schooled to stillness. A warrior might weep with decorous sorrow or roar in rage, but this shrilling clamor was a women’s thing. The death music, it was called. It opened the gate of the world and granted the dead admittance to the far bright country. The louder, the more deafening it was, the swifter the gate opened and the greater his welcome.

  Sparrow shrieked with the rest of them, a shrill ululation that tore her throat at first, but after a while poured out of her without effort, a throbbing of pure high sound. Some of the other women were doing the same. Then others, and others, coming into harmony, matching tone and rhythm to—why, Sparrow’s; and that was matched to the beating of blood in her veins.

  All voices gathered into one voice, one great ringing peal at the gate of the gods’ country. It carried them to the burial place, to the open maw of the barrow, and the silent and stunned-looking priests and shamans. There had never been a death-cry like that one. There might never be again.

  All at once, as the people reached the barrow, the cry abandoned Sparrow, left her alone and silent and rather cold in the deepening dusk. Her ears were ringing. She could barely hear the drum that began to beat, or the priests’ chanting, late and rather feeble, as if the death-cry had left them reft of strength for their own part of the rite.

  She was half out of herself, and not minded to return altogether to her body. In this state she saw, oh, so clearly. The stars were great blooming flowers in the deep blue of the sky. The people were shadows with pale blurred faces. The torches that kindled among them and about the barrow were dim and red, like embers.

  Only the stallion, of all that stood on that earth, seemed real. His coat was night sky flecked with stars. His mane and tail were a fall of moonlight. Horse Goddess was not in him, but he was her child. Her blessing washed him in light.

  Sparrow watched the priests lay the king in his tomb, settle his weapons about him and his belongings and the provisions for his journey to his tent beyond the stars. They brought in a fine bay stallion, one of the sons of the fallen king of stallions, and sacrificed him to the king’s spirit, laid the body at his feet and the head above him.

  Then the women came, all his wives and concubines. They were dressed in their best tunics, with their most precious ornaments, their long hair flowing free and crowned with flowers. They bowed before their husband—stumbling, many of them, as if drugged with grief or a shaman’s potion. Their faces in torchlight were blank. None uttered a sound.

  They lay in the barrow, composed as if for sleep. And the priests and all the men of the People raised the barrow over them, closing them within, still living, still breathing, drugged nigh senseless but alive.

  21

  Not one of the old king’s women was left in the outer world. All of them had gone to the tomb with him, every one, wife and concubine.

  Sparrow, trapped far back among the people, dazed and stumbling with the after math of her strange song and stranger trance, could say nothing, do nothing, prevent nothing. She was a woman of no account, the lowest of the People. Only a newborn girlchild was less than she.

  Walker had done this. He might protest that it was no decision of his: the priests and shamans had decided it, taking no notice of any bargain that he struck with a woman. But Walker was the great shaman, the young king’s favorite. One word of his would have changed the law and set the women free.

  Sparrow found a name for the thing that swelled inside her. Anger. No, more than anger. Rage.

  It was not only hers. Horse Goddess had spoken through her. It had been the goddess’ will that this change be made. And the shaman had not only disregarded it, he had made certain that every royal woman died in her husband’s tomb, not only the wives. It was a message, and clear—as clear as the sky full of stars, and the voices of priests and warriors singing the king to his rest, and the night wind across the plain.

  Sparrow went away with the other women, silent as they all were, and left the men to complete the rite alone. When they came back to camp, she did not speak to anyone. She crawled into a corner of her father’s tent, pulled one of the sleeping-furs over her head, and vanished into darkness.

  oOo

  Wolfcub had been startled to see all the king’s women led into his tomb. Even Fawn, for whom he grieved, and the redheaded woman whom Linden had tumbled on the night Wolfcub slew the boar—every one of them.

  It seemed excessive. But none of the priests raised an objection. The shamans watched without expression. Drinks-the-Wind looked shrunken and old, leaning on the shoulder of one of his sons.

  It was not Walker who did that filial duty. Walker stood beside Linden, gleaming with satisfaction, and watched the old king’s burial as if he had wrought the whole of it.

  Very probably, thought Wolfcub, he had. Walker’s star was rising fast, overwhelming the elder shaman’s. Drinks-the-Wind was wholly in his power, or else cared too little to stop him.

  Wolfcub stood on Linden’s other side. He could not protect the king if Walker chose to stab him with a knife, but Wolfcub did not expect the shaman to do that. Linden was too perfect a tool in Walker’s hand.

  While the rite and the burial stretched toward a grey dawn, Wolfcub studied the men about him, the priests, the shamans, the king’s companions. As he would in a hunt, he considered paths, discarded some, and came to a clearer sense of what he could do, or would. He did not waste time in recalling that he was young and had little by way of either wealth or power among the People. He was the boarslayer, the king’s companion. That should be enough.

  When at last the old king was closed up in his barrow with his escort of wives and concubines, Linden rode nine times round the barrow, mounted on the stallion who had killed his father. He sang the final song, the departing-song, which entrusted the king’s body to the earth and his spirit to the gods. Then in the grey light before sunrise, he led them all to the camp, to sleep as they could before the sacrifices began, the great rite and festival of the ninth year.

  oOo

  For all those nine days Wolfcub kept his counsel, performed the rites as he was asked, and kept watch over the young king. Thrice they sacrificed the Hound, thrice the Bull, and thrice the Stallion. Nine times they feasted, till even the lustiest of them was heavy and sated. Nine nights they danced and drank and sang.

  There were women, too. Unmarried women whose fathers and kin were oblivious or willfully ignorant, even a few married women who dared defy their husbands, haunted the shadows about the circles of the dance, and lured dancers away to celebrate the festival in the most pleasant wise.

  There would be children born in the spring, hasty marriages made and wives protesting that their husbands must have forgotten in the fog of kumiss—of course they had coupled together in the festival. Offspring of this rite whose secret was known were called the gods’ children. It profited them little enough, granted them no power or magic, but they seemed more blessed with good fortune than some.

  Wolfcub was much sought after. His place
near the king, the legend of the boar, and this new face that he seemed to have grown into without knowing it, made the women come seeking him. He lay with one or two: a girl of the Dun Cow who was as sleek as an eel and as noisy as a heifer in heat, and a woman of the Tall Grass people who lay with him silently but sang to him after, a sweet wandering song that maybe had magic in it. It did not weaken him, whatever it was. It sent him back to his king’s side refreshed and alert for any threat to the king’s life or spirit.

  He never saw Sparrow. She was not one to go hunting young men in shadows, and she was not among the women who served the men in the feasts. There was never quite time to go in search of her.

  oOo

  The tenth day was a day of great quiet and, in no few instances, roaring indisposition. Wolfcub woke in the king’s tent, which was now Linden’s, and concluded that he was not as badly off as most. He had drunk relatively little, and eaten not much more than he needed. He would live.

  It was full morning already when he emerged from the tent. The women were out and about as always, tending fires, baking bread, looking after children. For the most part they ignored him as he went to the trenches to relieve himself. There was no other man in sight, there or in the camp, except for a figure or two snoring in the shade of a tent.

  Wolfcub did not return at once to the king’s tent. He went to his father’s instead. Aurochs, as he had had hoped, was up and eating a bite of breakfast, washing it down with Willow’s potion. They both greeted Wolfcub with a smile, and Willow fed him as she had his father.

  Wolfcub fully intended to speak his mind to them. But somehow he could not do it. He ate, drank, spoke of small things. He basked for a while in their pride. He reflected that Willow was wise and Aurochs one of the elders, when he chose to be.

  But when he had spent an hour with them, he left with the words unsaid. This was not a thing for the elders, or for his mother, either, though she might argue otherwise.

  Some of the other companions were awake when he came back to the king’s tent. Linden was in the inner room, but it was clear what he was doing: whoever the woman was that he had taken to bed with him, she made no secret of her pleasure in his company.