by Judith Tarr
“No,” said Sparrow.
“But—”
“Horse Goddess has purposes of her own. She has little love for the men of our people. They try her patience.”
“But if they come with war, the people here will die. They’re not warriors. There’s not even a warband.”
“I know that,” Sparrow said. “I have to trust the goddess. And so should you.”
Keen bit her lip. That was true. She should try harder to trust in Horse Goddess’ will. But she could only think of Walker, how relentless he was in pursuit of a goal. What he wanted, he had. No matter what it was.
Would he want her?
Her eyes fell on the cradle, and on the child in it. That, he would want. A son of his body, a strong and kingly child. Maybe, for Summer’s sake, he would want Keen again.
Did she want him?
That was a question she would never have thought to ask before she crossed the river into the south. She should not be thinking it now. And yet there it was.
She had loved Walker so much, and been so eager for his touch, his loving, his regard. All of that was gone. When she remembered him, she remembered how he had abandoned her in the spring camp, and forgotten her thereafter, pursuing his advantage through a loftier marriage. If he would take her back—which she rather doubted—it would be as a lesser wife, subject to the Tall Grass woman.
Keen had not known she could be so bitter, or could cherish her anger so long. What she wanted . . .
While she was maundering, Sparrow had risen quietly and gone away. Someone else was sitting in the place that she had left, waiting patiently for her to notice him.
Her heart leaped at the sight of him. Her smile was sudden and heartfelt. He returned it without an instant’s hesitation.
She wanted Cloud.
It was a terrible thought. She had to put it aside while he was there, as difficult as that was. She wanted to touch him, run fingers through his curly beard, feel the surprising softness of his skin. She wanted to know with her hands the width of his shoulders, the muscled strength of his arms. She wanted to feel his arms about her, and hers about him. She wanted—
She wanted to taste the salt of his skin. She wanted to kiss him till she was like to drown. She wanted to feel him inside her, hot and strong, filling her, making another child.
She was Walker’s wife. She belonged to him. But people here grew angry when she said such things, and insisted that she belonged to no one except herself.
Cloud lay with Rain, she knew that. Rain lay with other men—had lain with Kestrel, people said, before Sparrow came. Then, they said, Rain no longer lay with him. He was a single-hearted man as they put it; he was a man for one woman, a rarity and much admired, though most of them did not understand it.
They were so free here—so wanton. Women walked about with their breasts bare, flaunting themselves, and no one disapproved. The king herself did it, proud of her big round breasts with their dark nipples, and the king-marks and shaman-marks swirling on them. She took men to her bed nearly every night, and seldom the same man twice running. It was a kingly thing to do, if she had been a man—to take many lovers and never devote herself to one. It proved her strength before the people.
Keen could not do such a thing. It was not in her. But one man of all the dark lovely men in this tribe, him she could dream of, and did.
oOo
Not long after she understood that she wanted him, he came to her as she sat in the sun, rocking the cradle with her foot, and Spring was in one end and Summer in the other, both blessedly asleep. Rain was gone somewhere, not too far or for too long, but it was something to do with being a shaman. It was very warm that day, the new moon before the moon of midsummer when the tribes of the north would gather for the great sacrifice.
Tribes here did not gather so. Two or three or four would meet sometimes on common ground, dance together and sing together and share their young men and women. They would linger for a day or three, then part, returning to their own lands. Only a month before, a tribe called Laurel had met the Grey Horse on its journey from camp to camp, and they had danced and sung together for a hand of days. Keen, still weak from the baby, had stayed apart from most of it, but she remembered the singing; it had been wonderful.
Cloud as always was patient with her, and let her remember him in her own time. The sight of him in the flesh, after the dreams she had had, was almost too much to bear. Dreams could make a man more than he was, more beautiful, more gentle, and far stronger. But Cloud was just as he had been in the dreams.
Completely without willing it, she leaned toward him and stroked fingers down his cheek. His beard was crisp and yet soft, as she had dreamed it would be.
She snatched her hand back with a gasp, stammering an apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I don’t know—what I—”
“I do,” he said, warm and rich with—laughter? No, nothing as slighting as that. It was joy. “I did come to tell you that you’re well, as if you couldn’t tell. And that, if you’re minded—”
He did not finish. He did not need to. Keen knotted her fingers together in her lap. Her traitor fingers, that would have loved to finish what they had done, run down his cheek to his breast, down and down, until—
She hammered the thought down and sat on it. “My husband is far away,” she said.
“One who would be your lover is here.”
She caught her breath at such boldness. As wanton as these people could be, she had never expected him to be so direct. Rain, yes. But Cloud was a man of exquisite discretion.
Not, it seemed, in such a state as he was in now. He was not at all embarrassed by it. He carried himself, in fact, as if it were something she should be pleased to see: as if it were his gift to her. A tribute. A homage to her beauty.
Part of her reveled in it. But the part of her that was a properly brought up wife was appalled. She should not even look at a man not her husband, let alone lust after him.
He reached across the slight space between them and took her hands in his. It was a simple gesture. Anyone could do it, friend or kin. But it made her heart shudder and threaten to leap out of her breast. He leaned the last of the distance, and lightly, oh so lightly, touched his lips to hers.
She should recoil. She should escape. She should not open her own lips to meet his kiss, or observe with dizzy delight that he tasted of sweet grass and herbs.
He drew back. She followed by no will of her own. Her hands freed themselves from his, to clasp behind his neck. He was only a little less tall than she: a tall man among these southern people. He was much broader, much stronger.
And yet he was so gentle. He was rampant between them, but he made no move to seize her and fling her down. He kept his wits about him.
That, as small as it was, was her downfall. If he had moved, if he had forced himself on her at all, she would have torn herself away and fled. But he left it entirely to her. It was her choice, to go or to stay.
She had never been given a choice. When her husband wanted her, she was expected to oblige him. She had never approached him. She had learned to want him, and to want him sorely, but always it was he who had come to her. It would have been unthinkable of her to go to him.
Here, a woman could ask. Or if a man asked, she could refuse. It made her head swim to have so much power. She could send him away, and he would go.
Or she could say, “Show me how a man loves a woman, here in the southlands.”
He was quiet in his joy, but his eyes were almost too bright to meet. He kissed her softly but thoroughly, taking his time about it, letting her understand how many ways there were to take pleasure in a kiss.
When she understood that, he drew back. He said, “That is the lesson. Tonight I’ll come to you. You may refuse me. Remember.”
Her shock was so great that he had gone before she found words to speak. Summer woke then and began to bellow, and Spring, thus roused, shrieked with him. In settling them, and with Rain’s coming to dist
ract her, she almost forgot what Cloud had said and done to her.
47
Cloud came as he had promised, slipping into the tent that Keen shared with Sparrow. Sparrow was not there: she was gone from the camp again. Summer was asleep in the king’s tent, close by Spring and her mother. Keen was alone.
She had decided that she would not do it. She would sleep in the king’s tent, or go away somewhere as Sparrow had. But when night came, she went to bed as always. As always, she plaited her hair neatly and folded her tunic as a pillow, and lay down in the darkened tent.
He brought light with him. He had one of his people’s clay lamps that burned rendered fat from the cattle, its flame so dim and so flickering that it did little to banish the dark. But that little was enough. He set it atop a lidded basket and knelt beside her.
She rolled onto her face to cover her nakedness, blushing furiously. But she kept an eye on him—for wariness, she told herself. He had, somehow, shed his tunic.
She had not seen him naked before. He was much the same below as above: not so broad in the hips as in the shoulders, by far, but well-muscled, with strong black-furred thighs. His manly parts were as substantial as the rest of him. He was beautiful as a bull is, or a stallion.
More than ever she felt like a peeled wand, thin and pale, with no strength in her. But he regarded her in open admiration. “So beautiful,” he said. “Like a white lily. Do you not show yourself to a man? Is it something your people forbid?”
She hid her burning face; but inside her something cracked. Something tight and hard.
She thrust herself up. She let him see what there was to see: narrow hips, narrow shoulders, breasts not small as the People reckoned it but little enough here. They were empty now, their little milk dried; they were not quite as firm as they had been, and her belly was a little slack still, scarred from carrying the baby.
His expression was so fierce and yet so tender that her heart nearly stopped. He reached to run a finger down her cheek, down the slender length of her neck to her shoulders, pausing just where her breast began its soft swell. “Beautiful and beloved,” he said in his voice that was full of slow music. “Will you let me love you?”
She could not speak. Her throat was shut.
“Well then,” he said as if that had been an answer. “I will let you love me. Here, see. Touch me.”
She could not.
He took her hand in his and raised it to his cheek; then drew it down as he had done to her, to his breast over the heart. “That is a beginning,” he said. “Have you never loved a man of your own will?”
She shook her head.
“Then you must learn.”
She wanted to learn. She was afraid to learn. It was too bold. It expected too much.
He would not stop until she had done it. He coaxed her till she kissed him, herself, leaning toward him, touching her lips shyly to his.
Something in the touch made her bolder. She ventured to lay her hands on his breast, to run fingers through the curly hair. She had never touched a man so before.
And he was letting her—he was glad of it. He knelt quietly while she explored him, doing what she had dreamed of: spanning the width of his shoulders, testing the strength of his arms, and shyly, shakily, freeing his hair from its plaits. Once freed, it sprang into a mass of curls, thick and wonderfully soft.
He shivered at that, with a murmur of pleasure. It seemed he liked her hands in his hair, combing fingers through it, trying to make order but only making it more riotously unkempt. The slide of it against his shoulders roused a gasp from him. She followed it down his back, finding the places that made him gasp anew, stroking slow circles along his spine and across his shoulders, then down into the hollow of his back.
She should have flinched from that; from taut buttocks and firm thighs, and the discovery that, rather to her startlement, his ribs were wickedly tender. Fingers brushed across them made him flinch and shiver. Persistence made him collapse in helpless laughter.
Laughter—in this. He took revenge, too. He snaked out a sly hand and found her own vulnerable portions, till they rolled together like puppies, he laughing, she giggling with no control over it at all.
They came to a halt against a heap of bundled hides, he on his back, she half-sprawled across him. One small shift, one turn of the hips, and the hard hot thing between them would be inside her.
She could not move. His laughter had died somewhat after hers. He lay quietly. All but his rod, which knew well what it wanted.
She rose over him. She shifted, turned. She did—herself, with no aid from him—what no proper wife should ever do. She danced the rest of the ancient dance with a man not her husband.
The gods did not strike her down. Her flesh did not wither from her bones. Nor did her womanly parts shrivel and grow cold. Not at all.
This man was large, and filled her almost too full; but as he matched her slow and rather tentative rhythm, it seemed she had never been filled, or satisfied, before. He took heed of her. He noticed what made her flinch, and what made her quiver, however slightly, with pleasure.
She had not known how lovely it would feel to be stroked along the back and flanks while he was inside her, or how exquisitely sensitive her breasts would be, sparking with delight at the quick dart and flick of his tongue. He loved her everywhere, not only in her secret place. And she, belatedly, tried to do the same. She was awkward; she lacked the sense of what to do. Rut she did try.
The summit when she reached it was sudden; it caught her by surprise. She had been so intent on him that she had hardly taken notice of her own body.
But he was intent on it. He raised her slowly, step by step, higher than she had ever known it was possible to go. When she was near to crying aloud with the intensity of it, he held her there. And met her, in a hot swift rush that sent them both swooping down into breathless stillness.
She lay for a long while, all her body thrumming. Little by little she remembered how to breathe again.
He was holding her in his arms. Her head lay on his shoulder. It fit perfectly there. His warmth, the scent of him, the strength that he never flaunted, were all perfectly as they should be.
Guilt was there, no doubt of it, but faint and far away. Her hand found his. She wound her long fingers in his shorter, broader ones. Her spirit felt as if it had done the same. Woven with his. Become a part of it.
oOo
Keen was a terrible creature, a monster, a woman who had betrayed her husband. And she was as happy as she had ever been. It burst out of her in song, in a voice she had barely known she had: clear, pure, and surprisingly strong. She sang as she tended the children. She sang as she plied her needle, fetched wood or dung for the fire, gutted fish or plucked fowl or skinned rabbits for the pot.
“We should call you Linnet,” Sparrow said with every evidence of amusement, as she came on Keen rocking the cradle with her foot, sewing a tunic and singing a song that had come to her out of the sunlight and the birdsong and Cloud’s presence in her arms the night before.
Keen blushed. He always came well after dark, and never when there was anybody about. And Sparrow had not been in her own tent in days.
Still, Sparrow was a shaman. She must know. And though she hated her brother, surely what her brother’s wife did to dishonor him—
She did not seem angry or outraged. She was smiling, not as brightly as she would have before Kestrel went away, but warmly enough for any purpose. “It’s good to see you happy,” she said.
Keen could not look at her till her hand tipped Keen’s chin up, making her meet Sparrow’s eyes.
“I know,” Sparrow said. “Everybody does. It’s a wonderful thing; a great joy, too. Do you know what the Grey Horse People say? Men and women are made for one another, and often in great numbers. But when a man is made for one woman, and a woman for one man, the gods have given their greatest gift.”
“I haven’t—” Keen said.
“I forgot—you can’t see it
, can you? Wherever you go, his shadow goes with you. Where he walks, your shadow walks beside him.”
Keen shook her head. All the brightness had vanished from her heart. “It can’t be so. I belong to someone else.”
“Not any longer,” Sparrow said, “if in fact you ever did. Are you tormenting yourself over my brother? Silly fool. He never thought twice before he supplanted you with a richer wife. Would you like to wager that he’s taken another already? Or that if he hasn’t, come the gathering he’ll find himself an even more advantageous match?”
“I’m sure he will,” Keen murmured. “But I still belong to him.”
Sparrow shook her head. “You always were a stubborn thing—even when you seemed most pliant. Promise me something, Keen. Promise that whatever you do, you won’t harm Cloud.”
“What, do you love him, too?”
Sparrow bared teeth at her. “Not as you do—but he’s a good man and will be a very good king. Promise.”
“I’ll try,” said Keen. It was as much as she could do.
If she did harm him, if anything she had done caused him any suffering, she would die. She contemplated it with perfect calm. If it must be, then so it would be. The gods would do as the gods chose to do.
48
The gods were against Linden’s riding into the south. Walker swore that it was not so, but Kestrel knew what Walker was, and that was not a shaman. The waves of storms that swept spring into summer, the flooded rivers, the unwonted cold and the delay of summer’s warmth, kept the king in camp long after he would have been gone. And the hunting was as bad as Kestrel had known it would be—worse, once the storms began.
The People would not have suffered terribly for that, for they had their herds, which were numerous. But the storms brought a plague in among them. Calves and kids, such as were born alive, died of sickness. So too the foals, which were the People’s greatest treasure.
Only the royal herd seemed to escape the curse that was on the rest. The white mares foaled in proper time and brought forth strong young—and every one a filly. No colt was born to them, no stallion who would be. Then when each came to the foal-heat, her sisters drove off the stallions who came courting, savaging any who persisted.
