Lady of Horses (16 page)

It made no effort to conceal itself. It sat at its evident
ease, watching her. It was not hungry, not just then, or she would never have
known it was there till it fell upon her. It was curious, maybe. It wanted to
see where she was going and what she would do, lone frail creature that she was.

Keen was going to die. This was the shape of her death.

She was oddly calm, contemplating it. It helped that she was
so empty; the wind blew through her, and sang in the bones of her skull. This
must be what shamans knew, who fasted and purged themselves so that they might
walk between the worlds. But she was very much in the world, this and no other.
She saw no spirits, heard no voices in the wind. Unless the lion was a
spirit—which could well be. Else why was it letting her live?

When she had rested, she went on. The lion followed, keeping
its distance.

She never forgot that it was there, but she kept her eyes
fixed ahead of her. She would not glance fearfully back. When it attacked, if
it attacked, she would not turn to face it. She would let it bring her down as
it did the gazelle, headlong and all at once. There would be less pain then,
and less terror.

All that day she walked in the track of the People, and the
lion walked in the track that she left. She began to believe that it was a
spirit, or a god’s messenger. Though what it came to tell her, she could not
imagine. Maybe she would know when it killed her.

She walked for a while after the sun had set, not because
she was afraid, but because her feet were in the habit of walking. She was as
light as air. Maybe the lion would not need to bring her down: maybe her spirit
would slip free of its own accord and leave her body for the lion to eat. Maybe
that was what it waited for.

Starlight bathed her. Moonlight washed over her. She did not
know if she slept. Maybe she had no need of sleep.

Out of the moonlight, over the silvered grass, came a white
shape. Keen saw it with utter lack of surprise. She was in the gods’ country
now, surely, on the far side of the sky. And there was Horse Goddess with her
servant riding on her back there as in the lesser world, come to take Keen
home.

Keen held out her arms. As she had on that night outside of
the spring camp, Sparrow drew her up to the mare’s back.

Keen did not cling so tightly now. She was dead. What harm
could come to her? She rode almost at ease away from the lion, toward the moon
and the tracks of the stars.

oOo

When the People broke camp in the morning, Sparrow was not
among them. Wolfcub had slept somewhat in the night, once he was relieved of
his place in the guard. He was fresh enough come daylight, in body, though his
heart was deeply troubled.

He had decided before he slept to let be; to make himself
forget what he had seen, and to hope that Sparrow came back safe and with Keen,
equally safe, beside her—afoot, and not riding on the white mare. But once he
was awake and had broken his fast and mounted to ride, he kept his stallion to
a walk as the People moved on past.

Some of the men called greetings. No one seemed curious. The
women he avoided, and they avoided him, for he was mounted on a horse.

But the gods were not content to let him be. Just as the
last of the People passed, as he prepared to turn back through the ashes of the
camp, one whom he should have been watching for came up beside him.

Walker the shaman had not spoken to him since he slew the
boar; indeed had never had much use for him, as young as he was and as little
use as he seemed to be. But a boarslayer was a different creature than a mere
lone hunter.

“A fair morning to you,” Walker said with what many might
have taken for good cheer. But Wolfcub saw how cold his eyes were. “Will you go
hunting, then, and bring us back a fine kill for the pot?”

“I might,” Wolfcub said, making no great effort to be
pleasant. “Why? Do you want another boar?”

Walker laughed. It was a lovely sound. No doubt he practiced
it in secret. “Are you minded to slay one?”

“Not likely,” said Wolfcub.

“That’s wise,” Walker said. He rode forward. His horse was a
handsome creature but evil-tempered, as he himself was. It jostled Wolfcub’s
stallion—by accident, maybe; or maybe not.

When the flurry had settled, Wolfcub was riding beside
Walker, and there was no sensible way to escape. Walker went on as if there had
been no interruption. “Boarslaying is a mighty thing and a great honor, but
it’s best done sparingly.”

“I would be the last one to contest that,” Wolfcub said.

Walker smiled. “They say you have a level head and few
pretensions. And yet you slew a boar.”

“I did what was necessary,” Wolfcub said. “And now, if you
will pardon me, I must go hunting.”

“Oh, yes,” said Walker magnanimously. “Yes, go, go.”

As if, thought Wolfcub, he thought anyone needed his leave
to go where he would. Wolfcub escaped, a little desperately perhaps, but very
glad to be free of that presence.

oOo

Out of wariness, or perhaps even fear, he let Walker see
him go off eastward, and not south where he wanted to go. Then, again warily,
before he went out of sight, he turned north. Only when he was far from the
march and well out of its view did he turn back southward. Foolish maybe, if
the shaman had the eyes of a raven or a falcon and could see where he went; but
surely Walker would not trouble with that.

Wolfcub hunted, chiefly because the gods set prey in his
path: a brace of fat geese. With a soft grey body slung on either side of his
horse’s withers, Wolfcub continued southward for a good while.

He was not at all displeased to be away from the People so
soon after he had come back. They all said he was odd in his predilection for
solitude. Odd or no, he preferred to be alone.

He followed the beaten track, the grass trampled down and
scattered here and there with the refuse of a tribe on the march. Somewhat
before noon he came to last night’s camp. Nothing stirred there but a flock of
birds squabbling over the People’s leavings, and a thin and mangy jackal that
slunk off with its tail between its legs.

He found them soon after that: Sparrow afoot, Keen on the
mare’s back, walking doggedly northward. Sparrow was as she always was, compact
and complete within herself. Keen looked as if she had come back from the dead.

They paused as Wolfcub drew near. He had a greeting ready,
as calmly casual as Sparrow’s expression while she waited, but he never uttered
it. Keen sighed just as he came level, and slid bonelessly to the ground.

Wolfcub sprang from his stallion’s back. Sparrow was there
already, cradling Keen’s head in her lap. “She won’t eat,” Sparrow said. “She’s
ill—she lost a baby back there, I think; she won’t say. Her spirit keeps trying
to wander away from her body.”

“Ai,” said Wolfcub: a soft sound of dismay. Sparrow’s eye
caught his. It was dark and steady. In it he found what he needed to do.

They did it together. They settled Keen as best they could,
built a fire, plucked and cleaned the geese and spitted them and set them over
the fire, and heated water in Wolfcub’s traveling-pot. Sparrow cast herbs in
it, that she took from Keen, who did not revive to challenge her.

While the geese roasted and the water boiled, Wolfcub sat
with Sparrow and stared at Keen. “Will she die?” he asked.

Sparrow lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “The gods know. She
lost too much blood. Then she walked so far before I found her. She had meat
with her, and a little bread. She hadn’t touched it. She’s spirit-lost, I
think.”

Wolfcub shivered. Sparrow could be calm about it—she was a
shaman’s daughter. But such things were strange to him, and frightening.

Sparrow touched his hand. It was a rarity, and it made him
shiver in a very different way: one that she seemed unaware of. She never had
seen him as he saw her. He was like a brother, he supposed, male but not a
man—not someone she looked on with desire. Whereas he, when he looked at her . . .

He reined himself in, sternly. Her hand still rested on his.
“I can try,” she said, “to bring her back.”

“That’s shaman’s work,” he said, too hastily. He was not
thinking. He was trying very hard not to think of her touch, or the way her
dark lashes brushed her cheeks when she blinked, or the sweet round shape of
her in the shabby deerskin tunic.

She bridled at his words, withdrawing her hand, half-turning
away. “Yes. I should wait, shouldn’t I? Till we can bring her back to the
People. So that a shaman can find her spirit where it’s wandered, and bring it
back to her body.”

Of course she should. But as Keen lay by the fire, white as
milk, thinner and frailer than he could ever remember her being, Wolfcub knew
what Sparrow surely knew. She might not live so long.

“You can do it,” Wolfcub said. “Can’t you?”

“A woman cannot be a shaman,” Sparrow said, stiff and cold.

Wolfcub snorted. “Oh, come. When did that ever stop you?”

She was angry, but she must remember as well as he the games
they had played when they were children: games in which she did things that the
Grandmother taught her, which he had learned afterward were shaman-things,
things of magic and power. Such things as she still did, but without telling
him. Riding the white mare. Hunting and finding Keen where no one else had
thought or known to go.

“If I do this,” she said abruptly, taking him by surprise,
“you have to help me. Hold my hands. Keep part of me in the world. Can you do
that?”

He nodded. His spirit was a little lost itself, maybe, here
on the wide plain under a cloud-tossed sky. The white mare stood near, grazing
quietly, and the ugly little stallion not far from her. What that meant—what it
said of Sparrow—Wolfcub could not tell yet. He was not sure he wanted to.

They were out of the world in their way, far from the
People. Sparrow turned back toward him and took his hands in her warm firm
ones. He was always surprised to find her so solid and so strong for a woman.
“Watch over me,” she said. And with that, she went away.

oOo

Sparrow had been thinking since soon after she found Keen
that she would have to do this—this thing that shamans did. Keen’s pallor, her
remoteness, the way her soul wandered, frightened Sparrow; and more so as she
understood what it meant. She had tried to speed the pace, to bring Keen back
to the People, to Drinks-the-Wind who knew best how to bring back a lost
spirit, but Keen could not travel so quickly. Her body was too fragile.

Wolfcub’s coming was Horse Goddess’ own gift, and utterly
like him. He would never know, because Sparrow would not tell him, how glad she
was to see him and how welcome his presence was. She would have been happier
not to burden him with the secret of the mare, but that was betrayed already,
and had been when she left to find Keen. Horse Goddess wanted it. She made that
clear.

Now Sparrow sat opposite him in the savory odor of roasting
geese, hand linked to hand. He was quiet and strong, clear-eyed and very still,
just as she needed him to be. His familiar face, the peak of ruddy brown hair
on his forehead, the way his brows arched over his grey eyes, held her to the
world as strongly as his hands, as the soft hiss of his breathing, as the
warmth of his body and its familiar musky scent.

But she had to walk where spirits walked, or Keen would go
away and not come back. Balanced between his hands’ strength and his eyes’
clarity, she stepped—outward.

The Grandmother had taught her this long ago. She had
thought it a great game then to slip in and out of the body’s bindings; to ride
the wind at night or to soar on falcon’s wings by daylight. After the
Grandmother died, when her courses came, it became terribly, wonderfully easy
to slip free, particularly when the moon’s blood flowed.

But she had clung to the flesh of late, out of wariness and
for fear that someone would catch her in it. Then the mare had claimed her, and
that took all the soul and spirit she had, and left none for spirit-walking.

It was still easy. So simple, like the release of a breath:
gathering the threads of her spirit, winding them into a shape like a bird or a
spear, and casting it forth. For a little while she hovered in the air between
the two bodies, one empty, one bright with living presence.

As she paused there, her eye drifted toward the one who lay
beyond, the pale shell wrapped in something other than sleep. A thin thread of
spirit coiled within it, but it was no more solid than spidersilk.

She touched it. It uncoiled, shrinking away from her. She
sank down into the shadows inside it.

This country she knew. It was like the world without, a wide
and rolling plain threaded with rivers and vaulted with sky. It edges were
dark, the deep shade of forests. Far away on its horizon rose the jagged teeth
of mountains. But where the living world was green and gold, blue and white,
grey and brown and red, this was all grey, like rain, or like pale shadows.

The sky boiled with clouds. Things flew there, shapes like
her own, like birds, like insects, like arrows shot from the bow. Those were
spirits, the Grandmother had told her. So too was the land alive with
creatures, guides and servants, shamans on journeys, witches, sorcerers. Some
were dead, but most were the living, or spirits bound to earth or air. The
dead, the great ones, the ancestors and the gods, lived in their own country
beyond the horizon. Sparrow had walked there, too, but today she would not do
that; not, please the gods, while Keen’s body clung to life.

Amid so vast a country, so full of beings coming to and
going, small wonder Keen was lost. She was no shaman, nor greatly gifted in
matters of the spirit. And yet somehow, when the thing that had not been a
child yet slipped out of her, too much of her had gone with it. Her spirit had
tried to follow, and been caught in this country between, this grey and
shadowed place.