Lady of Horses (17 page)

Sparrow had kept a grip on the thread that was Keen’s life.
Now she followed it, as thin and nigh invisible as it was. She traced it
through the shadowed country, across the featureless plain beneath the starless
sky. It stretched almost too taut—as if it would break.

A shape grew out of air beside her. The mare was a white
light in this grey place, a splendor of divinity amid the flittings of lesser
spirits. Her light put the shadows to flight. As she had the first time Sparrow
rode her, she bade Sparrow ride on her back, and carried her swifter than
Sparrow could ever go alone.

Sparrow clung to the shining white mane and slitted her eyes
against the bite of wind. On the mare’s back she had her own shape and
substance, and her own strength, too, which was greater than she might have
imagined.

She needed it for that ride along the thread of Keen’s life.
It went far, very far, on and on till without the mare’s presence Sparrow
herself might have begun to diminish and fade into a shadow.

Then at last near the heart of that plain she found what she
looked for: the shadow of a shadow, a dim and flickering thing that even as she
cast her eyes on it, began to fade. The mare’s light gave it a little more
substance, but not enough. Sparrow swooped upon it, and caught it. It was like
catching at a spider’s web, so fragile and so easily broken. And yet somehow
she closed her fingers about it. She drew it up.

As it came, as it touched the shimmer of the mare’s light,
it deepened into a greater solidity. The thing in her hand was an arm, and a
body dangling from it, too thin, too pale, and all but lifeless, but it wore
Keen’s face. Sparrow held to it, letting it fall face-first over the mare’s
withers. The mare stood fast under it. She wheeled in a long curve and sped
back the way she had come.

oOo

Wolfcub did not know how long he held Sparrow’s hands. It
was not so very long: the geese were still roasting, the water simmering,
steeping the green astringent herbs. Sparrow gasped, quivered, gripped his
hands so tight he set his lips against the pain. Just as suddenly, she broke
free, half-falling, stooping over Keen.

Keen had not roused. But her breast rose and fell strongly.
Her cheeks were no longer quite so pale. She looked alive as she had not
before: as if she slept, not as if she slid into a long slow death.

“She’ll live,” Sparrow said. Her voice had a flat sound to
it, as if she had emptied herself of all emotion.

“But will she wake?” Wolfcub asked—foolishly perhaps, but he
had to know.

Sparrow nodded, though the movement almost felled her. “I
need to sleep,” she said. “Feed her some of the broth with goose-fat stirred in
it. Wake me when the sun goes down.”

She did not wait for Wolfcub to answer. She dropped down
beside Keen. When he touched her, she did not stir. She was deep asleep, deeper
even than Keen.

He sighed faintly. He had a great deal to ponder, but he was
not ready yet to do that. Sparrow and the mare. Sparrow doing such a thing as
shamans did—and with ease and grace and swiftness that he had not seen even in
the great ones. He had eyes to see, and a spirit that perceived more than some.
He had followed her a little way. He had seen where she went and how she went
there.

If a woman could not be a shaman, then gods knew what
Sparrow was. Something greater than a shaman, maybe. Just as a woman could not
ride a horse—and this mare carried Sparrow willingly. This mare who was, his
heart knew, more than simple earthly creature. Much more.

It was all too much to take in. He settled for meddling with
their dinner, drawing off the fat as Sparrow bade him and stirring it into the
broth of herbs, and feeding it sip by tiny sip to Keen. At first she took it
passively, but all at once she seemed to wake; she struggled, tossing her head,
spitting out the mouthful of broth that he had dribbled into her.

She was alive, awake, open-eyed and glaring. A glare from
gentle Keen bemused him perhaps beyond wisdom. He could only stare at it till
she came to herself a little, looked about and softened slowly. “Where—what—”

Her voice was rusty, but to his ears incalculably sweet.
“We’ll catch the People tomorrow, I expect. Here, eat a little meat. You need
to find your strength again.”

Keen looked as if she would have argued, but women learned
early to heed a man’s voice—and Wolfcub’s had deepened gratifyingly in the past
season. She gave way to it with little of her usual grace, let him feed her a
mouthful, then two, before she turned her face away.

He did not press her. She had eaten enough for one who had
been fasting. The sleep that took her then was good sleep, strong sleep, sleep
that healed.

She would live, as Sparrow had said. He thought she might
even gain back the heart and spirit that burned so low in her still.

Keen came back to the People on foot, walking arm in arm
with Sparrow. The mare was nowhere that any of them need see. Wolfcub had been
prevailed upon with difficulty to hunt elsewhere and return later.

Sparrow might not have insisted on that, but Keen had roused
from her long black dream to the conviction that it were best he not be seen
with the two women. Even if he walked—she would not hear of it.

She doubted that he understood. Sparrow did, perhaps: she
let the two of them settle it while she bade farewell to the white mare. The
mare was not happy, either. Her ears were flat and her tail flicked restlessly.
But she went as Wolfcub did, because she was not given a choice.

The People were camped two days’ march from the plain of
gathering, in a place where they had camped for time out of mind. The priests
and shamans had already begun to prepare for the rites which they would
oversee. The young men practiced with weapons and in the dance. The elders held
council.

The two women slipped into this camp with all its bustle and
confusion, and dared to hope that if they had been missed, it would have
mattered little to anyone where they were gone.

That indeed seemed true for Sparrow. As soon as she appeared
near Drinks-the-Wind’s tent, one of the wives was shrilling at her, bidding her
do something or other, and not so much as a greeting or a by-your-leave.

Keen escaped under cover of Sparrow’s preoccupation. She was
not as strong as she wanted Sparrow and Wolfcub to think, but she had the
strength to find her tent and belongings in a heap with the rest of the
baggage. She set up the tent in its usual place in the camp, alone, though
people paused to stare, and one or two tried to offer a hand. But she wanted
none.

At this time of day Walker was always out and about with the
men or sitting in the elders’ circle. She was free, then, to rest; and in a
little while she would go out, and see what there was to eat. By sunset, when
Walker was likely to come in search of her, everything would be as it had been
since they were married.

She spent a little time imagining what she would say to him,
and what he would reply. She hoped he would not be angry; surely he would have
worried, though he had trusted others to go looking for her.

Walker did not come back that night, nor did she see him in
the morning. When they broke camp, she packed up the tent and its belongings as
always and loaded it all on the back of the dun ox that her father’s wives had
given her at her wedding. She was weak still: she had to pause more than once
to breathe.

The second time she did that, the bundle she was lifting
flew out of her hands. Wolfcub flung the rest of them onto the ox’s back, bound
them with skill that left her staring, and walked away before she could muster
a word.

Of course he would do that. A man who lowered himself to
such a task, and for another man’s wife, trod the thin edge of propriety. His
silence let people pretend they had not seen it. His departure freed them of
any need to disapprove.

Keen found that her eyes had pricked with tears. She blinked
them away quickly. She was being a fool, as she had been since she let herself
be lost on the plain. She had to be strong, to be herself again.

On the march she often took her place near her father’s
wives and some of her sisters, but today she found it simplest to fall in
behind Aurochs the hunter’s women and youngest children. Aurochs was out
hunting again as he nearly always was. His senior wife, who happened to be
Wolfcub’s mother, walked alongside Keen, leading her own ox and carrying on an
easy and altogether undemanding conversation. Hunting, of course. Men in
general. The best way to cook the neck of a deer, with which some of the other
wives took issue. Gossip here and there, of things that Keen had cared about
once and would again, maybe, but she was still too frail in spirit.

Something in Willow’s expression, some tilt of the glance,
told Keen that this was not happenstance. Wolfcub had asked his mother to look
after her. Keen’s resentment was sharp as she understood that, but she lacked
the strength to be contentious. After a while she could even smile a little,
thinking of that young man and his meddling. Wolfcub was like that, after all.
Not like Sparrow, who was inclined to let things be, or else to rush in
headlong and cause a great deal more trouble than if she had kept away.

Friendship, thought Keen. Her eyes were pricking again. She
gripped the ox’s lead tighter and trudged on steadily, the women’s gait from
the dawn time, one foot in front of the other, pace after pace, measuring the
broad earth in the length of her stride.

oOo

The People were among the first to come to the plain of
the gathering. Only a handful of tribes were there already: Red Deer, Dun Cow,
Cliff Lion that was nigh as great as the White Stone tribe, and would have been
glad to be greater. White Stone, as the largest tribe, the king-tribe, had the
best camping place, the long rise above the great river, with a lesser river
flowing along the foot of it to merge with the greater one beyond. They had
clean water unsullied, and the best grazing for their herds. From the hilltop
they could look down on the rest of the tribes as they came in one by one, and
at night see the campfires spread along the river like a field of stars.

Their camp guarded the great circle on the hill’s summit
with its stone of sacrifice, and lay closest to the field where the dancers
gathered. They were the guardians of the sacred places. Their priests were
highest in rank, their shamans known to be strongest and most skilled in magic.

Of course there was envy. And it was a ninth year. Everyone
spoke of it. The sacrifice, which in lesser years was but threefold, Hound and
Bull and Stallion, this year would be ninefold. And some of the tribes that
held still to the older ways would gather to choose one of their young men, an
unblemished youth, a warrior and a dancer, for the great sacrifice.

Time was when he would have been offered as king, but now
even these tribes chose kings as the White Stone did, though the taming of the
king of stallions. The young warrior that they chose would go as messenger for
all the people of the plain, all the tribes who bowed before Skyfather and rode
on the back of the horse-god, bearing their greetings and prayers to the gods
beyond the sky.

But people were whispering. Everyone knew that the king of
the White Stone stallions was dead, and that a new king had risen—and the king
of the White Stone People had not yet tamed him.

“Yet,” said an elder of the Cliff Lion as Wolfcub was
passing by. “What if that is never? It takes a young man to tame a stallion.”

“Or an old one with skill and craft,” one of his companions
said. “It’s a young stallion, hardly more than a colt. It shouldn’t tax the
king too greatly.”

Wolfcub’s step faltered. At that, some of the elders of the
Cliff Lion had laughed, but it was a low sound, like a growl. There was danger
in it.

None of them spoke aloud what they must be thinking. If the
king of the White Stone was not strong enough to keep his place, another king
might think to claim it for himself.

Wolfcub wondered if Walker had thought of that. In all his
plans and scheming, he might only have considered his own tribe. But the other tribes
might have somewhat to say of such a king as Linden.

oOo

“As the kings of the lesser herds did?”

Sparrow was scraping hides when Wolfcub found her, kneeling
on a great pale bullhide and attacking it with a scraper of hardened bone. It
was a vigorous task, particularly in the heat of the day. Her face was crimson,
her hair escaping its plait to cling wetly to her cheeks. Wolfcub could not at
all escape noticing how the neck of her worn tunic drooped over her round
breasts, or how the thin leather clung to them.

He tore his eyes away and focused his mind on her words,
which were sharp, clear, and measured in strokes of the scraper. “The king
stallions all bowed to the mares’ choice. How do you know the kings of men
won’t do the same?”

“Men are men,” Wolfcub said, “and they don’t listen to
women.” Her eyes flashed up at that, but she kept her temper in check. “Men
listen to shamans.”

“One young shaman, however powerful?”

“All the shamans of the tribes, even Drinks-the-Wind, if my
brother has his way.”

“You don’t know this.”

She bent to her scraping. The hide gleamed with her labor.
It would be a fine tunic, from the quality and thinness, for her father or one
of his wives.

“You don’t know it,” Wolfcub repeated. “Do you?”

She did not answer. She never did, if she decided that she
had said enough.

He hissed in annoyance and left her kneeling there. He had
been going hunting, but now he was minded to hunt men. She had made sure of
that. He could not go his own way, not until he had proved to himself that she
was wrong.

Shamans in camp kept to themselves except during festivals,
when they gathered to work magic and to cast omens for the tribe. Shamans at
the gathering, which was one long festival, made camp by the sacred places, and
therefore in or very near the camp of the White Stone People. It always
surprised Wolfcub to see how many of them there were. The People had
Drinks-the-Wind and Walker Between the Worlds, and Drinks-the-Wind had a
handful of apprentices. Each of the other tribes had a shaman, rarely two. Two
full shamans in one tribe was a great thing, though it was only to be expected
of the White Stone People. They were great in magic, everyone knew, and much
blessed of the gods.