Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

  “This is a curse indeed,” Walker said. “And we know who laid it on us. We must go. We must destroy the thief who stole our king of stallions, the witch who has afflicted us with this plague of ill fortune.”

  Linden heard him avidly. So, by then, did the elders. The young men of course were all afire to be gone. No one pressed him to stay, to wait until the gathering, when he could muster the warbands of the lesser tribes and ride southward with an army.

  “That’s too late,” he said, and Walker abetted him. “We’ll go now—as soon as there’s a break in the rain.”

  oOo

  That break came, by chance, within a day of Linden’s saying so. The clouds lifted in the night. The sun rose over a sodden earth, rivers swollen beyond their banks, and drowned things floating in them. But Linden did not care. The light was brilliant, and warmer than it had been in all that bleak season. “An omen!” he cried. “The gods are with us after all.”

  His men cheered. The elders and those who would stay behind echoed them.

  The women in their tents were silent. Only when the warband had gathered and mounted and ridden out did they lift up the song that every man heard as he rode to war: the shrill and piercing keen that was half dirge, half war-cry.

  Kestrel’s mother had told him that morning as she plaited his hair in the war-braids that she would not sing for him, or for his father either—for Aurochs was riding with the warband as guide and guard.

  “If we could bring you with us—” Kestrel began.

  “A woman in a war-party?” Willow shook her head sharply. “Not unless she’s a captive—and I refuse to be that. Stay alive, child. You and your father both.”

  oOo

  The memory of her face followed him as he rode away from the camp. She was refusing to weep. Tears were a weakness. She sent him out firmly, and his father after him, the two of them so alike, she declared, that if they lingered she would be calling each by the other’s name.

  Kestrel eyed his father sidelong. It did not seem likely that he was as handsome as that. He was certainly not as calm or as beautifully composed.

  Aurochs had greeted his return with an entirely uncharacteristic display of emotion: brimming eyes and a long, breathlessly tight embrace. Since then he had been much his usual self, except that he kept to the camp much more than Kestrel might have expected. But with the hunting so bad, there was little enough profit in going out.

  Kestrel had not looked for him to come on this riding. Most of the older men stayed with the tribe, to rule and guard it, and to escort it safely to the gathering. But Aurochs prepared for war with the younger men, chose his remounts, mounted and rode with the warband.

  Kestrel wondered briefly and unbecomingly if he did it to keep watch over his son. That was hardly likely. He wanted to go to war, that was all. Men did, even men of substance, husbands and fathers.

  He was welcomed gladly. Before he was a hunter he had been a famous warrior. His skill with weapons was if anything greater than it had been then, and he was still a young man after all, still in his prime.

  Strange to ride with Aurochs as an equal, not as father and son but as warrior and warrior. Other people than his mother remarked that they looked alike; that Kestrel seemed older and his father younger than he was.

  Aurochs said nothing to that. Kestrel had nothing to say.

  oOo

  The weather held as they rode south. They had somewhat to do to ford the one or two greater rivers, which should have been sinking to their summer levels but were flood-high. That delayed them, but not by as much as Kestrel would have liked.

  The time for gathering was coming, but they had passed the great camping-place already. They paused there to pay respect to the sacred places. Linden offered a young stallion on the stone—the beast had gone lame beyond repair, but he was fine enough to please the gods, once his blood had been let and his bones laid on the fire.

  They ate his consecrated flesh and raised the hide above the altar-stone for the People to find when they came, such of it as the beasts and birds might have left. Its stripped skull they raised on a spear and left on guard, the king’s promise and his boast, that he would come back riding his own royal stallion.

  Linden was sure of it. He rode as one possessed by the gods, in a white fire of certainty.

  Walker abetted him. Kestrel wondered when people would begin to notice that the shaman had no visions to give them. Those that he spoke of were old, from before Drinks-the-Wind left the tribe. The vision that led the warband was Linden’s.

  oOo

  Kestrel was not asked to guide them. Not yet. South of the river was all Linden needed to know until he came there.

  Kestrel rode as a warrior. Most days he even managed to pretend that that was all he was. Then memory would strike, or some glint of the sun or ripple of the wind through grass would remind him of what he was, and of what he went to.

  Sparrow was there. When he let himself, he could feel her, a warmth of presence, cooling if he turned east or west, going cold if he turned north; but while his face looked southward, it was as if he stood in front of a fire.

  He dreamed of her as he always had, and that was strange, because she never upbraided him for what he had done. She came into his arms with a sigh of homecoming, loved him with as much passion as ever, and never, not once, called him what he was, which was betrayer of his faith to her.

  oOo

  The weather grew gentler and the hunting better as they made their way south. They met the Red Deer on their way to the gathering, paused in their camp for a night, and in the morning took with them a good portion of the tribe’s warband.

  Its king did not come, which was as well. Two kings were too many on such a raid as this. But the young men were delighted with the adventure. They brightened the air immensely with their laughter and singing, their fresh horses and their lively spirits. They had not had such a spring as the People had. All the storms had kept to the north.

  Tall Grass must have passed them by. Kestrel could not tell if Walker was glad or sorry for that. Glad, maybe, that he did not have to pretend to his wife’s father that she was a frequent occupant of his bed. He had not gone to her, people said, since soon after he married her. She was known not to be with child, nor was she likely to be.

  “Some women have no use for men,” Willow had said when Kestrel happened to ask.

  “Maybe she has no use for that man,” Kestrel had said.

  “That’s possible, too,” said his mother.

  Whatever the truth of that, they passed the place of the Tall Grass spring camp, but the tribe was gone. They camped southward of it, near the river. In the morning they would cross.

  Some of the men went down to the ford to see how deep the water was. It ran high, but not, Kestrel reckoned, high enough to be impassable.

  His father agreed with his reckoning. “We’ll manage,” he said, “though we might lose a horse or two. It’s treacherous toward the middle, if you don’t know the way of it.”

  “You know this river?” Kestrel asked.

  “I’ve crossed it,” said Aurochs. “There’s good hunting in the woods beyond.”

  Kestrel nodded. His breath was coming short. It had struck him rather too suddenly, if far from the first time, that past this crossing there was no turning back. Linden would not stop until he had his stallion.

  There was nothing at all Kestrel could think of that would turn Linden from his course. The gods’ own storms had only been able to delay him. They had given up—or were biding their time.

  That could well be so. Had they not waited till Kestrel crossed before, to smite his companion with lightning and sweep his horses away?

  “There’s death in your eyes,” his father said.

  Kestrel closed them. “I am thinking,” he said in the blood-tinged dark, “of the gods and their playthings.”

  “Yes,” said Aurochs.

  Kestrel opened his eyes again and turned them on his father. “Would you ha
ve done it? Or would you have stayed?”

  “I would have done it,” Aurochs said.

  It did not comfort Kestrel as much as he had hoped, hut it soothed him a little. There was another man in the world at least who was as stiff-necked as he was.

  oOo

  That night in camp, Walker approached Kestrel as he sat apart. Others had tried to persuade him to join in the dancing and singing about the fire, but he had ignored them.

  Walker he could not ignore. The shaman sat beside Kestrel, took the skin of kumiss that he had been trying to drink himself senseless with, and drank deep. “You’ll be our guide once we cross the river,” he said. “Is it far, where we’ll be going?”

  “Far enough,” said Kestrel. Kumiss had lost its allure even before Walker drank a good portion of it. His head ached, but was damnably clear nevertheless.

  “Will we come there before midsummer?”

  Kestrel slanted a glance at him. He was too casual. This question mattered. “Why?” he asked. “Are you hoping we’ll have gone there and back again in time for the gathering? That’s not likely.”

  “I didn’t think it was.” Walker drank again from the skin. He had been drinking before that: he was steady and his voice was unblurred, but his eyes were a little too bright. “We’ll have our sacrifice in the warband. The gathering has been seen to.”

  Kestrel raised a brow. “Yes, I thought it would have been. The elders, who speak for the king—”

  “The elders will speak,” said Walker, “and the shamans will proclaim their visions. My visions, O hawk of the gods. But that matters little. What matters is here. After gathering, the tribes will gather again here, in this place, to wait for us.”

  Both of Kestrel’s brows went up. For some reason he was calm, though this was a thing he had not known. “Do the others know of this? Does Linden?”

  “Oh, no,” said Walker. “The word has gone through the shamans, from the Red Deer onward. Their gathering is for the gods, and for the making of marriages among the tribes. The other, the new gathering . . . that is for something else.”

  He put Kestrel rather vividly in mind of a dog who has stolen a bone and carries it off to bury. Whatever he plotted, it pleased him very much indeed.

  “I don’t suppose,” said Kestrel, “that you’re mounting a war against the southern tribes.”

  “Oh, no,” said Walker. “Not at all. We don’t need the southlands yet. This is for the north.”

  Kestrel’s breath left him slowly. He had not even known he was holding it. “That . . . may be wise,” he said.

  “It’s very wise,” said Walker. “It’s my plan. Mine. You’ll see. You might even marvel with the rest of them. Though you’re not the sort to marvel at much, are you? You have a cold heart.”

  Not where he loved. But Kestrel did not say that.

  He sat in silence, watching the dancers about the fire. They were dancing the wardance, leaping high, whooping and chanting their vaunts. As he watched, Linden sprang up in their midst, naked, gleaming with oil, hair loose and streaming bright sun-gold. Whatever he lacked in wit, he lacked nothing in beauty, or in virility, either. And he was incontestably fierce in battle.

  “Pretty, isn’t he?” said Walker beside him. “We should put him to stud like a fine stallion, and breed lovely fools for the warbands.”

  “He is the king,” Kestrel said. “You raised him up. Are you regretting it now?”

  “Not at all,” Walker said. “Maybe we’ll have our stud-service, at that. He’s got all his wives with child, and most of his women, too.”

  “Even the old shaman’s wife?”

  “No,” Walker said. “Not White Bird. Pity. She’s the most like him of any.”

  Since Kestrel had often thought the same, he held his peace.

  There was a pause. He dared to hope that Walker would grow weary of silence and wander off, but Walker seemed determined to torment him to the utmost. “Tell me, hunter. Tell me the truth. Is my wife—out there? With the others?”

  Kestrel could not see the use in denying it. “Yes. She is.”

  “She was stolen, too,” Walker said. “Taken from me, to mock me as the stallion was a mockery of the king. She’s mad, you know—my sister. She hates us.”

  “I wouldn’t call it hatred,” Kestrel said.

  “What would you call it, then? Malice? Contempt?”

  Kestrel did not answer.

  Walker grinned mirthlessly at him. “You did find her, didn’t you? Did you ever lie with her? Southern women are wanton, it’s said. Her mother would have lain with half the men of the People if my father hadn’t kept her muzzled and bound.”

  Kestrel set his teeth.

  “You did, didn’t you? Was she worth it? Because of course, you know, I should geld you, since you dishonored my sister.”

  That was a jest, or Kestrel was meant to take it so. But he had little enough humor when all was considered. His smile was completely without mirth: a baring of teeth, no more. “You’d do better to kill me. Because if you did less, I would hunt you down and kill you.”

  “You are a great hunter, of men as of beasts.” Walker’s glance took in the boar’s tusks and the lion’s claws. “Will you add a shaman’s skull to your ornaments?”

  Kestrel had a moment’s flash of Sparrow standing by the fire in the Grey Horse camp, holding up a skull-cup set with blue stones and carved with swirling signs.

  Those signs he knew very well. They were limned in her flesh, sealing her power. Out of that vision he said, “Never fear that, shaman’s son. If I should take a skull, it would be to drink true power.”

  With that he rose and walked away, it little mattered where. Nor did he look back, to see what Walker made of his words.

  49

  Sparrow stood by the fire on the eve of midsummer. The Grey Horse People were camped at the northernmost edge of their lands, by a grove that was sacred to Earth Mother.

  In the daylight, Cloud had sacrificed to the great goddess: slitting the throat of a snow-white bull and letting the blood pour out on the ground. Time was, they had said, when it was not a bull who died but a youth of the people; but that custom was forsaken. Just so in the north, each year a young king had gone to the altar- stone and given his life for the people; and the one who took his life took with it his kingship.

  The world had grown soft in its age. Yet Sparrow felt no softness in it tonight. The stars were fierce in their multitudes. The fire leaped high. The scent of roasting bull was strong.

  She lifted the cup of Old Woman’s skull, offering it to the ravenous stars. It was full of berry wine, leavened with a sprinkling of blood.

  The people watched in silence. Even the horses were watching: the mare, the silvermaned stallion. The mare was vastly in foal, and uncomfortable with it, but she had come in from the herds to see this offering to her goddess mother.

  The stars found the offering good. Sparrow poured out a little on the ground for Earth Mother to drink. Then she sipped the sweet strong wine and passed it to Storm who stood nearest. Storm bowed low over the cup, sipped, passed it to Cloud, and he to Rain; and so on through the circle of the people.

  It came back not quite empty. One drop lingered. Sparrow offered it to the fire, which hissed in response.

  So was the feast blessed and consecrated. Sparrow laid the cup away in its wrappings and gave it to one of the children to take back to her tent. At that signal, the silence burst in a torrent of sound: singing, skirling of pipes and beating of drums, and the pounding of feet on earth as the people began to dance.

  Sparrow was not too heavy with child yet to dance, but her mood was strange. When she held the cup to the stars, in the fire’s flare she had seen for a moment Kestrel’s face. It was stern and might have seemed cold, but he always looked so when he was heart-sore. She wanted to reach out to him, touch him, assure him that all was well; but he was gone.

  oOo

  She retreated from the firelight and revelry toward the white glea
m of the mare. The mare had no greeting for her. She was intent on something far more important than her servant. Her tail lashed; she stamped, snapping at her sides.

  Sparrow might have withdrawn, but the mare made it clear: she was to stay. So too the stallion, though not too close—she lunged at him when he ventured nearer.

  She foaled there on the outskirts of the firelight, while the people danced and sang in Earth Mother’s honor. From the glimmering caul emerged a dark nose and dark feet, elegant curling ears and shoulders broad enough to give her pause. Sparrow eased the foal from its mother’s womb till it lay on the grass, glimmering wet, struggling already to stand.

  It was a colt. He was all dark but for a star on his brow; he would be grey, she knew, though in youth he would be black. He was the very image of his sire, who stood well apart, neck arched, nostrils flared, alert in every muscle. As his son drew breath in the world of the living, he loosed a peal, a trumpet of greeting and of triumph.

  The dancing paused. The music faltered. The fire flared, catching the small dark thing and the recumbent mare. The stallion stamped and tossed his head.

  Somewhere among the people, a young man whooped. A woman answered him. They whirled into a wilder dance than before, a dance of greeting and of gladness, welcoming this new prince, this omen, this promise of glory: Horse Goddess’ firstborn.

  oOo

  On the day of midsummer, as Sparrow lingered with the mare and the new colt, teaching the colt to trust and never to fear a human touch, one of the children came running, shrilling her name. “Sparrow! Sparrow! Sparrow!”

  “Yes,” said Sparrow when the child was close enough to speak to without shouting. “That is my name. What is it? Does someone need me?”

  It took the child a moment to recover her breath, and with it such dignity as she had. “Storm needs you,” she said. “There’s a messenger. He comes from Greenwood clan. He says—”