Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  “But we should be horses,” Cloud said. “We’re Grey Horse People. Not Slinking Hare or Cowering Mouse.”

  “War is a boy’s dream,” Storm said. “What, did I misremember it? Did we never make you a man at the midsummer feast? And my heir, too?”

  He flushed. “Maybe you should have chosen one of your sisters’ daughters after all. Not your only son, who knows no better than to wish his people great again.”

  She was not to be swayed by such force. She regarded him calmly, with the same expression she wore when people were obstreperous in a gathering of the tribe. In that way she reminded him, without a word spoken, that he might be prince-heir, but she was king of the Grey Horse People, strongest of all her mother’s children, and gifted with both kingship and powerful magic.

  Cloud was not a shaman, nor would he be. He was not born to the power. One of his cousins apprenticed to his mother—and indeed most people had expected that she would choose her sister’s daughter Rain to be king after her, and not name her son instead. They two were born on the same day, of sisters who were twinborn. They were bound from before birth, and fated to rule side by side, shaman and king.

  Or so Storm and the elders had said when Cloud was given the horsehide cloak and the herdsman’s staff. It was of little moment out among the horses, with Storm disinclined to indulge his dreaming. When he was king, it would be different. While he was heir, he would do as she bade him.

  It was not an easy discipline. She brushed his cheek with her hand, ruffling the curly beard. “Child,” she said, “in your day you will be a king of notable wisdom. But until then, indulge me. Teach yourself to be patient.”

  “Patience is not a young man’s virtue,” he said, but less sullenly than he might. It was difficult to stay in a temper with her smiling at him, daring him to see the humor in it. With a snarl that was at most halfhearted, he bowed to her will.

  oOo

  Cloud camped with the herd that night, because the women who would have been the night guards were occupied with one of their sisters: she was birthing her first child. Cloud did not mind. It was a fine evening, clear and not too terribly warm. At sunset he settled in the camping place on a hill that overlooked the grazing grounds, and ate the dinner that his mother had brought him.

  The sky darkened as he ate, and the stars came out. There was a thin new moon, delicate as a young girl’s cheek. The hounds, whom he had sent to circle the herd, to be sure that nothing threatened the foals, came back to lie panting at his feet.

  Not long after full dark, the dogs’ heads came up. Cloud had been drowsing, part of him alert for signs of trouble among the horses. He snapped awake.

  A figure came toward him in the thin moonlight, glimmering white, seeming to float above the silvered grass. It seemed a goddess made flesh, and wonderful flesh, too: round and sweet, full-breasted and deep-hipped, clothed only in long black hair.

  She bent over him. Her broad nipples were dark in firelight and moonlight, her face hidden in the shadows of her hair. She smelled of grass and smoke and horses, warm woman and sweet herbs, and over them all the scent of flowers. She had crowned herself with them, petals hardly softer than her skin.

  Cloud wore only leggings against the night’s warmth. She unfastened the clout that covered his member, laughing softly as it sprang free, rampant in the moonlight. Her warm hand grasped it and guided it inside her, where she was warm to burning.

  She rode him as if he had been one of the stallions, the tall bay whom she favored most, with his beautiful red-brown coat and his waving black mane. Her fingers tangled in Cloud’s hair, which was as thick as the stallion’s and as black, and curled with abandon. Her lips brushed his, teasing, tormenting, as she held him just short of release.

  He could not bear it. He would break; he would scream. She grasped him with sudden and startling strength, rolled onto her back and pulled him over her, and then at last had mercy.

  He sank down gasping beside her. He was streaming with sweat. She licked a runnel of it from his shoulder. “Don’t fall asleep yet,” she said. “I’m not done with you.”

  He opened his mouth, indignant. She laid her hand over it. “Hush. Look at the moon. Isn’t she lovely tonight?”

  The moon was exquisite. So was she. He ran his hand over her breasts, down to the faint curve of her belly.

  She smiled and rested her hand over his, freeing him to speak if he would. Which after a while he did. “It’s well?”

  “Very well,” she said in a tone of deep contentment. “And will be till spring.”

  He sighed. When she said such things, she comforted him greatly. She was not an ordinary woman wishing for the best. She was a shaman. If she said it would be well, so it would.

  He had no such gifts, and yet he could swear that he felt something there. A warmth beyond her body’s warmth, a presence apart from her own.

  She arched under his hand, shifting it till it rested much lower. She rocked gently, almost lazily, and with an expression of pure wickedness.

  “Insatiable,” he said. “And wanton. Did you actually come from camp like this?”

  “Will you be shocked if I say yes?”

  “Nothing you do can shock me.”

  Her brow arched. She looked remarkably like the king, just then. “Truly? Then it seems I have work to do.”

  “Not tonight,” he said. Her rocking quickened. He matched it. She spasmed against his hand, locking about it, till with a sigh she subsided.

  He reclaimed his hand. She stretched along the length of him, head on his shoulder, and toyed with his manly organ. It was too early for that to revive, though it would have been glad to try.

  She was all but asleep, he thought, until she said, “Cloud.”

  “Rain,” he said, naming her as she had named him.

  “Cloud,” she said again, “Horse Goddess lives in the moon. Remember that.”

  She was asleep after all, and dreaming. Her voice had that sound to it. “I’ll remember,” he said to her.

  “And remember,” she said, still in her dream, “that the moon can come down to earth. A woman rides her. A man pursues her. He thinks he can destroy her. But no man can harm a goddess.”

  “That, too,” he said, “I’ll remember.”

  And he would. When Rain spoke so, she spoke true.

  28

  Wolfcub stood on the bank of the river that marked the southernmost border of the tribes’ lands. The ford to which he had come was much marked with prints of wild deer and boar and antelope and the beasts that preyed on them, even the vast deep tracks of a herd of aurochs. There were tracks of horses, too, a wild herd that he had seen not long before, winding up a hill in search of better grazing.

  Amid all the rest, he had found what he looked for: two horses of good size and rounder hoof than was common in this country, each carrying the weight of a woman. His quarry had come this way, paused to drink, then forded the river.

  He had tracked them from quarter moon to quarter moon. Tonight it began again to swell to the full. Spearhead was still with him, no longer contemptuous of women’s strength, or of their hunting skill either.

  Wolfcub, who had taught these two everything his father had taught him, often caught himself regretting it. They had been apt pupils—delighting him then, defeating him now. And they were mounted on faster horses.

  He squatted on his heels and dipped a handful of water, then another, quenching his thirst. Within arm’s reach was the place where Sparrow had done the same. He brushed his finger over her tidy print, broader than Keen’s but smaller. A glimmer of her presence came with it, a memory of her face—and memory, too, of a round brown breast, glimpsed once when he caught her swimming near spring camp. She had caught him watching her, had made no move to hide, but finished coming out of the water. It was he who had averted his eyes and fled before he saw more than a flash of breasts and belly and thighs.

  He sighed. Spearhead crouched beside him and drank as he had done, but seemed not
to see the print. He had seen the horses’ marks, and the droppings that they had left, which was good tracking in its own right. “Do we go on?” he asked.

  Wolfcub wet his hands again and laved his face. He tilted his head back, letting water run from his beard down his neck, cooling his breast. “Do you want to go back?”

  “Not without the stallion,” Spearhead said.

  Wolfcub nodded. “Bad enough that we’ve taken this long. If we come back empty-handed, what do you wager we’ll do worse than be booted out of the companions?”

  “We’ll find ourselves marching afoot and waiting on the women.” Spearhead spoke dispassionately. He was not one to shrink from the truth. “Or more likely we’ll go as escort for these horsethieves when they’re sent to the gods’ tribunal.”

  “You don’t think Linden’s anger would have cooled?”

  Spearhead snorted. “Even if his could—and the way he thinks of that horse, it’s not anything I’d lay wagers on—the People wouldn’t let him. That’s their strength running away southward, stolen by a pair of women.”

  “Stolen by a white mare.” They had had that argument before. Spearhead shook his head, but for once did not try to contend that a mare could not steal a stallion. Stallions stole mares and human folk stole horses.

  Wolfcub thrust himself to his feet and stretched, groaning a little. He had run afoul of a lion—fortunately a young one, and solitary—hunting the same herd of deer. The marks of its claws were healing. The claws themselves hung about his neck, all but a pair that he had insisted Spearhead take, and the lionskin was the dun’s new saddlecloth.

  Spearhead, who had brought down a fine doe before he realized that Wolfcub was entangled with a lion, had come in time to weaken the lion with a well-aimed arrow. Wolfcub had dispatched it then with his spear. And now he was lionkiller as well as boarslayer, which was surely the gods’ jest.

  He did not want to cross the river. He wanted to go home, crawl into his father’s tent, rest his head in his mother’s lap, and sleep until the world passed away. Kings and shamans, death and revenge, boars, lions, mares, stallions, women whom the gods drove mad—all gone. All vanished.

  He was bound. He had to go.

  He called his stallion. The dun came a little reluctantly: he had found a patch of sweet grass. He brought a trailing mouthful with him, and finished it as Wolfcub mounted and turned him toward the river.

  29

  Sparrow’s great worry on the long flight, that Keen would sicken and fail, proved entirely misplaced. The longer they rode, the farther away from the People they went, the straighter Keen sat on the mare’s back, and the clearer her eyes became.

  The shadow that had been on her was still there, but it had sunk deep. She was close to her old self again, the bright and laughing child who had run as wild as a boy until her courses came. She had decided to be a woman then, a creature of long skirts and lowered eyes, and nothing that Sparrow could do would shift her.

  They forded the river amid a herd of antelope, who jostled one another but did not flee the horses—strange thing, for these beasts must have known the terror of men on horseback. But it seemed they recognized the mare for what she was, and had no fear of her companions.

  Past the river, they rode for a while up a long slope to a broad green level, then down into a rolling country where, for the first time, they saw little thickets of trees marking the courses of streams. Trees were not a thing the People knew a great deal of. There were few on the plain, and none that a woman was allowed to approach, for like horses they were sacred to the men’s gods.

  oOo

  Keen would not go past the first small wood, not until she had entered it and stood in light that was all strange: dappled green and gold, and bounded with the trunks of trees. She looked like a tree herself, slender and tall, arms raised over her head, swaying in the wind that blew off the open country.

  She was quite outrageously beautiful. Sparrow smiled to see her. Even if she died for what she had done, she would die knowing that, for at least a while, Keen had been happy.

  But when they rode on, Keen’s face was somber, her gaze turned inward. It was some while before she said what burdened her mind. “Do you think anyone’s followed us this far?”

  Sparrow stroked the stallion’s neck. He arched it under her touch, and leaned into it as she rubbed the spot he loved best. He was neither goddess nor soul’s self, but she had grown greatly fond of him as he carried her uncomplaining day after day. It never troubled him that he had abandoned kingship and power to be a lone mare’s servant.

  But men never let go so easily. “They’ll think we stole the king,” Sparrow said. “I hope they followed one of our false tracks, or lost us in the herds that have so obligingly crossed our path. But if any one of them is hunter enough to see through all that . . .”

  “Wolfcub,” Keen said.

  Sparrow’s lips tightened. “Yes.”

  “He wouldn’t, would he? He’d have to kill us.”

  “Yes.”

  Keen shivered. But she kept her chin up. Her voice was firm. “Wolfcub would never do that. Even for king or shaman.”

  “For king or shaman he would do it,” Sparrow said. “His honor wouldn’t let him do otherwise.”

  Keen shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

  Sparrow shrugged. Keen could believe or disbelieve. It did not change the truth.

  She had been dreaming of Wolfcub. It was odd, because such dreams had the clarity of true dreams, but she knew they could not be. In some of the dreams, he was hunting her. That was true—her spirit knew it. He and another man, taller than he and thinner, with a brown beard. But the other dreams, the ones that were even clearer, must be some jest of the gods.

  In those dreams, there was no hunt, no revenge, no killing. The two of them were doing quiet things, ordinary for the most part: sitting by a fire sharing a bowl of something savory, or walking along a riverbank, or riding side by side, she on the mare, he on his ugly little dun.

  Always in those dreams, she was deeply, utterly content. She would wake from them with warmth in her heart that lingered even after she remembered where she was and how she had come there.

  And then there was the dream she had had last night. It began much like the others: the fire, the bowl. It was venison, she remembered, stewed with herbs and roots. The taste of it came to her even in memory.

  But after they had eaten it, he had risen and held out his hand. And she, in the dream, had taken it.

  They had gone into a tent that reminded her vaguely of his father’s and somewhat of the king’s. There he had turned to her, and the look in his eyes was unmistakable. Nor was her dream-self astonished. Wolfcub who in waking had treated her always like a sister, never as a woman, in the dream was all passionate, and all lover.

  She had seen him naked. Of course she had. Somehow, in this place of her dream, he was different.

  He was older, yes, than he had been the last time she saw him as bare as a peeled wand, leaping into the river amid a crowd of naked boys. His body fit itself. It was lean but graceful, the lines of it carved clean, like the lines of his face. It was a man’s body, strong and eager.

  And she was eager for him, a warmth between her legs and in her heart that she had not known before. It was she who closed the space between them, took him in her arms and drew him down into heaped furs. Her dream-self knew very well what to do there, though her waking self had never lain with a man in that way. No man had wanted her, nor had she wanted any of them.

  Except Linden; and she had always known that he was not for her. This man she lay with in dream was not Linden, and yet he was beloved. And beautiful—oh, he was that. Not like Linden, all sunlight and ruddy good humor, but a longer, leaner, more deliciously dangerous beauty.

  Strange to think of her childhood friend so, and yet he was. He walked like a young lion, and he was strong, with effortless strength.

  When she woke, her body was thrumming, as if she ha
d indeed taken a lover in the night. But there was no one about except Keen, curled tight like a little child, sound asleep; and the horses standing nose to tail. Wolfcub was far away. She doubted very much that he dreamed of her, except as a memory of grief.

  oOo

  Wolfcub dreamed of Sparrow as he lay in camp on the far side of the river. It was not the first time he had done so, nor did he expect it to be the last. In dreams she knew what she was to him, and she was glad. She loved him as he doubted she ever would in waking. And if he had to kill her in order to take back the stallion . . .

  Even dreaming, he could not set that thought aside. He turned his dream aside instead, and let it wander where it would, if only it was away from her.

  The night had not cooled more than a little. Morning brought with it a breathless heat, the sun hanging motionless in a pallid sky. Even the buzzing gnats were sluggish, and the horses had no speed in them. They plodded through dry and hissing grass. There were trees—they tracked the women to a thicket and out again, and onward across the rolling green country.

  The heat rose with the day. At noon they paused in the shade of a wood, though flies tormented them. There was water from a stream, and relief for a while from the sun.

  Wolfcub was tempted to stay, but he did not like the look of the sky. He would rather be out in the open if it turned as ugly as he feared. Clouds had begun to heap overhead, one atop the other, white as curds, but as they thickened, they darkened. The horizon to the south was blue-black.

  oOo

  The storm struck midway between noon and sunset. Even as long as he had been waiting for it, when it came, it came with appalling suddenness. One moment they trudged onward in the searing sunlight. The next, the world was black and roaring and shot with lightnings.