Lady of Horses (13 page)

He had seen Walker with the elder shaman, standing in the
king’s circle. Drinks-the-Wind looked as taken aback as the king, and as much
at a loss. Walker wore a grim expression and precious little else—for he had
been on the steppe, fasting and praying, when the stallions fought—but Wolfcub
could see in him no shock. No horror. If he had not brought this about, he had
welcomed it. Wolfcub was almost sure of that.

It was of a piece with his sending Linden to the old boar’s
kingdom and bidding him do insult to the boar and his wives. Walker had sent a
message to any who could understand it. He had it in his mind to make a king.

Who that king would be, Wolfcub was not absolutely certain.
It well might be Linden. But if Linden proved weak, or failed, surely Walker
had another prospect in mind—one who likewise was both handsome and biddable.

But there was none more handsome than Linden, and few less
truly wise. Linden wanted to chatter of the stallions’ battle, which Wolfcub
doubted he had seen: it had played itself out far from the camp, in the heart
of the herds. Even the priests had come too late to defend the king; they had
seen only the ending, and the king’s fall.

That did not silence Linden. “Can you imagine? A young
stallion out of the roving band, challenging the king—and winning. They say he
tore out the king’s throat, cast him down and crushed his skull. Is that the
work of mere luck, I ask you? Is that the act of a weakling or a half-grown
colt?”

“Ah well,” said Curlew, who sometimes followed Linden, but
sometimes not, “you know who it is, don’t you? It’s one of the grey herd. An
outlander. Who knows what gods live in them, or what powers even the young ones
hold?”

Linden nodded. “Have you ever seen him? He’s beautiful: all
black, with silver dapples. His mane is white. He looks like the moon in a
field of stars.”

“Ah! A song!” hiccupped the drinker in the shadows.

“Well, and I’m no singer,” Linden said, too modestly: he had
a pleasant enough voice when he troubled to use it. “But you know what the
priests say. The grey herd came on the wings of storm, from the gods’ own
country. This stallion is one of them. Maybe a god sired him. Maybe he was meant
to be king.”

“Maybe he’s a jest of the gods,” said Spearhead, but the
rest were falling under Linden’s spell. He did have a way about him, with that
pretty face. Rather like the new king of stallions, Wolfcub thought.

He had seen the one they spoke of. It was a pretty creature,
and full of itself, but he would not have wagered that it would do what it had
done. In that much he could agree with Linden. The gods played a part in this
somehow, for whatever purpose. Or Walker had made certain that they did.

oOo

Aurochs heard Wolfcub out patiently, considering the head
he must have had after a nightlong debauch with kumiss. He sat in his tent,
waited on by the youngest and loveliest of his wives, but they had retreated
when Wolfcub came. His mother came out instead from behind the women’s curtain
and sat demurely as a woman should, but he caught the sidelong flash of her
smile. She would speak with Wolfcub afterward, that smile said, but let the
proprieties be observed.

If Aurochs noticed, he did not acknowledge it—and that too
was proper. While Wolfcub told him what the young men had been saying, he drank
the potion that Wolfcub’s mother brewed from herbs and willowbark, grimacing at
its bitterness, but draining it manfully.

Wolfcub had his own cup, but he had put it aside after a
sip. His head was not as bad as that, and he was intent on what he was saying.
“I think Walker had something to do with this. And I think Linden is getting a
thought into his head. He likes pretty things. The new king of stallions is
very pretty indeed. Might not Linden begin to think that he would look most
handsome on that back?”

“He may think it,” Aurochs said, “but there’s no talk of a
new kingmaking among the People.”

“There has to be,” said Wolfcub. “The king rides the king
stallion. If he won’t, then—”

“Did anyone say he would not?”

Wolfcub frowned at the grass mat in front of his folded
legs. “People heard what the king said. There’s no time for a taming before we
leave for the gathering.”

“But,” said Aurochs, “there will be ample time for one once
we come to gathering.”

Wolfcub looked up sharply. He did not need to be told what
that meant. The king would tame the new king of stallions in front of all the
gathered tribes. That would be a kingmaking indeed—affirming his own power and
proving to the world that he was still, in the autumn of his years, both a man
and a king.

Aurochs nodded at the comprehension in Wolfcub’s eyes.
“What, you didn’t think of it yourself? It’s the wise thing. Of course the
young men don’t see it. They’re too impatient. They want it done now, in haste,
to much lesser purpose.”

“Yes,” said Wolfcub slowly. “And suppose the shaman foresaw
that—planned for it. Made sure it would happen. Then if there’s an accident, or
if the king fails in strength, he does it before all the tribes. And the one
who steps to the fore soonest will be everything that the old king hoped to
be.”

“I think you impute far more evil to the young shaman than
is actually in him,” Aurochs said mildly, but it was a reprimand. “You’ve
always disliked him. Don’t let that color your thoughts of him now.”

Wolfcub set his lips together. He could argue further, and
he would have liked to, but his mother’s glance stilled him. Willow, though no
longer the lissome creature who had earned that name, had both the astringent
wit and the strength of the willowbark that she brewed into her potions.

oOo

His father left not long after, seeking out the men’s
council, where they would no doubt consider and reconsider and consider again
all that had happened on the day before. Wolfcub lingered as his mother wished.
She served him bread and stewed antelope and a delicacy that she knew he loved:
the gut of a pig stuffed almost to bursting with meat and herbs and wild grain,
roasted on the fire. He savored its pungent sweetness, which she knew best how
to make of all the women of the People.

When he lay back and belched nobly, she set a cup beside his
hand. It held herbs steeped in water, much more pleasant than her potion, and
mildly invigorating. As he sipped it, she sat on her heels nearby and said,
“You’ll not get the older men to believe Walker is conniving at anything more
than the choosing of his next wife.”

Wolfcub’s brows went up. “Is he doing that?”

Willow shrugged. “He might be. It’s been a year since he brought
Keen into his tent. She’s given him no son, nor showed signs of conceiving any.
But that one . . . who knows? He’s always been odd. He well
might think that one wife is enough trouble, and leave it at that.”

“Unless he can gain some advantage by taking a second. He
might cast his eye on the daughter of another tribe. A king’s daughter, maybe.
If there is a kingmaking at the gathering, and he’s seen to stand behind the
new king, who knows what wealth he might win?”

“You,” said Willow, “are surprisingly subtle for a young
male. Who taught you to think like that?”

Wolfcub grinned at her. “Why, Mother! You did.”

“Yes, it’s very improper,” she said, from her very proper
and demure position, sitting on her heels, knees close together, hands folded
in her lap.

She had been pretty enough when she was young, people said,
but had grown plain with age, a plump comfortable figure with hair dulled to
plain earth-brown that had once been as ruddy as his own. But her eyes were
lovely still, clear grey, and warm as they rested on him. He was her only son
who had lived to manhood, and the last of her children to be among the People:
the two daughters who had survived were both married to men of other tribes,
marriages that brought honor and alliance to the family, but gave her no
comfort of a daughter to share the tent.

Wolfcub supposed she doted on him more than was suitable.
But somehow he could not think of her as a doting mother. She was too sharp in
her wit, and too little inclined to indulge him when he was being a fool. She
was a great deal like Sparrow.

“Do you believe me?” Wolfcub asked her. “Can you credit that
he might be doing what I think he’s doing? He’s young, but he’s always been
clever. He has far more power than a man of his age is expected to have. If it’s
gone to his head, might he not think that he can make and break kings?”

“He might,” Willow said.

“Yes,” said Wolfcub. “And this is a ninth year. If he waits,
it may be nine years again before he can gain so much power from a kingmaking.
What young man ever could wait so long to take a thing he wants?”

“He could as easily do it in a year,” said Willow. “Or two
or three.”

“But a ninth year, Mother. A year when the gods demand human
flesh and human blood in their sacrifices; when the blood of bull or hound or
stallion is not enough. What greater sacrifice than a king? And our king is no
longer young.”

Willow sighed. “You never liked him. No one ever likes
shamans, even before the dreams come to them, or the spirits speak and claim
them for their own. I remember Drinks-the-Wind before he was a shaman: what an
arrogant young monster he was. His son is remarkably like him.”

“But when Drinks-the-Wind became a shaman,” Wolfcub said,
“he learned to be wise, and to soften his tongue.”

“He was older then than Walker is now,” said Willow. “I
always thought it was ill-advised to give that boy the rank and the power when
he took his manhood. No matter how strong he was or how sure in his power, he
should have been made to wait. Shamans are best made with the second coming of
age, when a man’s eldest child is grown. Not while he is still a child
himself.”

“Then you must see,” Wolfcub said, “that Walker is capable
of this—of making and breaking kings.”

“Or trying to.” She shook her head. “Who am I to judge? I’m
a mere woman.”

Wolfcub knew better than to laugh at the thought of his
mother as a mere anything. She paid lip-service to every propriety. It was her
weapon and her protection. Sparrow should learn it, he often thought, and maybe
would, if she lived to his mother’s age.

“And I,” he said, “am a mere boy. The men won’t hear me when
I warn them. Even Father barely listens.”

“He came back with you,” said Willow. “He gave you that much
credence. And he’ll be watchful, which is what you need of him. If he thinks
that others of the men should know, he’ll see that they do. You’ve done all you
should, and most of what you can.”

“But it’s not enough!”

“Nothing is ever enough, when one is young and male and
knows no patience.” Willow filled his empty cup again, this time with new milk
sweetened with honey, and said, “Now drink, and get you gone. You’ve paced and
snarled long enough. The sun’s up and the wind’s freshening. We’ll be breaking
camp within the day, if I’m not mistaken. Did you hear the Old Mare calling in
the dawn?”

Wolfcub had heard nothing before sunup but the hammering in
his own skull, but he did not say so. He drank his sweet milk and let himself
be chased out into the sunlight, where he was one of the few men on his feet
and almost clearheaded.

The rest would lie groaning abed till nightfall if they
could, but his mother had heard true. The horses were calling to one another,
shrill voices of stallions, deeper ones of mares. Whether the making of the new
king had roused them, or it was simply time, the herds were beginning to move.

It was not the Old Mare who woke the women with her
pealing in the night, though the voice was very like hers: strong and deep and
royally peremptory. It was the young mare, the one whom Sparrow knew better
than to think of as her own. She was declaring to the world that she had, at
last, found a stallion worthy of her.

That he had been hanging about since he was a yearling, and
that he had hitherto been less than the least of the foals in her estimation,
mattered little to the mare. He had conquered the king whom she had never
suffered to breed her. He could, in his turn, presume to court and then to
mount her.

Their mating was a wild and triumphant thing. The stallion,
who had taken remarkably few wounds in his battle for the kingship, came out of
that union streaming blood.

The mare was somewhat torn about the neck and shoulders, but
never enough to concern her. She danced in the dawn, to the stallion’s torment:
she had drained him dry, so that he would not breed a mare again that day, nor
for a while, Sparrow suspected.

oOo

She was there. She watched. In the confusion of the king
stallion’s passing and his funeral feast, she had managed to escape her duties
and run away to the herds. She had to hide: the priests were on watch, such of them
as lacked the rank or the boldness to officiate at the feast. They were waiting
to see if one of the other stallions challenged the new king. But none had.

They had a skin of kumiss for the vigil, and a feast of
their own, a young calf that they claimed as their portion. It was, she
observed, one of the king’s calves. She wondered if he would notice, or if he
would care. The priests could take whatever they pleased, within reason, but
mostly they left the king’s belongings alone.

Walker had had nothing to do with the old stallion’s fall.
Sparrow hated to admit it—she would have been more than glad to blame him for
it—but the gods had their own intentions. And the mares chose as they would,
however subtly they might do it. They had decided, for reasons best known to
themselves, that this young and rather callow if very pretty stallion was fit
to be their king.

Still, it served Walker’s purpose, and that she liked not at
all. She had seen him come back from his days on the steppe, naked and painted
and hung with amulets, handsome and knowing it, and not minding in the least if
the women happened to notice and admire. It had been he and not Drinks-the-Wind
who affirmed what the priests had come running to announce: that there was a
new king among the herds. And it was he and not the elder shaman who stood with
the priests while they roasted and divided the old stallion’s carcass.
Drinks-the-Wind came late from Lark’s bed, where he had been joyfully making
another child, and found himself relegated to the second place.