Lady of Horses (19 page)

People were still clapping and chanting, as if their eyes
had run far ahead of their bodies. Sparrow heard no sound of body striking
ground. Nonetheless she could have sworn before the gods that she heard the
soft, distinct snap of his neck.

oOo

Silence, when at last it fell, was profoundly blessed. The
stallion had fled still bucking to the far side of the circle, as far from—yes,
as far from Walker and as near to the mare as he might go. There perhaps he
would have regained his wonted calm; but the men there, no less fools than the
king, broke the bonds of the circle to surge toward him. He veered snorting and
plunged back the way he had come.

The king lay where he had fallen. He was limp, a broken
thing. The priests ran to him, and some of the shamans. First to reach him was
Drinks-the-Wind, his old friend and battle-brother. Even from a distance
Sparrow could see her father’s face, how still it was, how starkly white—nigh
as white as the fall of his beard.

The stallion, mad now with all the people closing in on him,
bolted straight for the king and the kneeling shaman. None of all these men,
horsemen though they claimed to be, had the wits to understand that if they had
kept their places, the stallion would have settled to grazing well away from
the fallen king.

A lone figure darted out from the crowd. Its yellow plaits
streamed behind as it ran. Linden, by luck or fate or the gift of the gods, caught
the stallion’s rein as it whipped past, sprang, got a grip on mane, flew onto
the stallion’s back.

He was mad, but so was the stallion—mad with running, not
with bucking and plunging. And Linden let him do it. He did not clamp or clutch
as the king had. He sat as quietly as a man could on the back of a horse
bolting wildly in a ceaseless circle, darting aside from men who stumbled into
his path, and no thought in his head but to run and run and run. Linden gripped
mane and loosened rein, crouched down and let him run himself out.

It had dawned on the crowding men, slowly but inevitably,
what Linden was doing—what he had done. They drew back out of his way. They
settled in their old places, more or less, in their old silence. They watched.

The priests and the shamans too had seen it, first in
avoiding the stallion’s flying hooves, then in marking who rode on his back.
All but Drinks-the-Wind, who was intent on the fallen king.

He did what he could. He straightened the tumbled limbs, and
the head awry on the broken neck. He closed the staring eyes. He sang a
death-song over the body, while the stallion, the kingslayer, galloped round
the circle.

Nine times the stallion ran that great circle. Sparrow
counted. Then at last near the fallen king, he pounded to a halt. That was
Linden’s hand on the rein and his weight on the young back, breaking through
the fog of fear and speed. The stallion stood breathing hard, foam on his neck
and between his hindlegs, but he was far from spent: he could still raise his
head and snort at the dead thing in front of him.

Linden gentled him with a hand, stroking his sweat-streaming
shoulder. It was a gesture altogether without thought, a horseman’s gesture.
The stallion settled somewhat to it, and consented to walk a slow and much
smaller circle, till his breathing quieted and the sweat began to dry on his
neck.

Linden, alone of all of them, did not seem to know what he
had done. He had calmed a frightened horse, that was all, and taught him to
carry a rider, so that he would not imagine that he could cast off any man who
sat on his back. There were tears streaming down Linden’s face, grief for the
king his father—but no thought, Sparrow was sure, of the consequence of his
fine horsemanship. The king of stallions had cast off and killed the king of
men. The king’s heir, his favorite son, had mounted the stallion and tamed him,
and rode him as horses were to be ridden, as both lord and servant.

The king was dead. The king lived, mounted on the back of
the silvermaned stallion.

Sparrow looked beyond Linden to the place where Walker had
been standing. Where he still stood, scrupulously out of the way, and for a
while forgotten. He was smiling with great satisfaction. There was no sign
about him of a dart, but Sparrow did not expect to find one. A shaman’s tunic
was capacious and full of secrets.

But Sparrow knew. It was as clear in him as if he had
shouted it to the sky. Walker had the king he wanted. The rest, he was certain,
would follow.

The king of the White Stone People was dead. The new king
rode into the gathering on the back of the young king of stallions, and the
priests paced behind, bearing the old king on a bier of spears and war-cloaks.
Word had come to the camp already, as swift as such things always were. The
women streamed out of the tents, wailing and rending their garments. Camp dogs
barked and snarled, shrieking as they did battle with one another, or as men
kicked or beat them out of the way.

The noise was indescribable. It brought Keen out of Aurochs’
tent where she had been invited to spend the day with Willow and the lesser
wives. It rent a cry out of her as if her body were not her own, a long
shrilling lament that went on and on without her willing it. They were all
doing it, all possessed by the grief and shock of a king’s death.

But even as the wailing poured from lungs and throat, her
eyes marked Linden on the stallion’s back, and Walker close behind him.
Everyone else was fixed on the king or on the old shaman who walked beside him.
But Walker, no. Walker looked like a father whose son has tamed his first
stallion.

There was no evident evil in it, no malice, only joyful
pride. Yet Keen’s shoulders tightened. She had never looked at her husband so
before—as if he were a stranger. And one, moreover, whom she did not
particularly like or trust.

Was this how Sparrow saw her brother? Sparrow had no love at
all for Walker, Keen knew that. Keen had never understood why, until now. And
for no reason, either, nor for any provocation. Walker had done nothing to her.
He had not even seen her since she came back to the People.

Maybe that was why. She was healed inside, but there were
scars. She wanted, needed, his warmth, his touch to assure her that she was
beautiful, his kisses to remind her that she was cherished. She needed—maybe
not to make another child, not so soon, but to know that she could. That they
would together, and this time, gods willing, it would live.

But he had never even noticed that she was missing, nor come
to look for her, nor cared to discover what had become of her. Aurochs’ young
wife Teasel had muttered just now, before the clamor brought them out, that it
was little wonder Keen had not seen him; he was always in the Tall Grass camp,
ingratiating himself with its shaman and exchanging heated glances with the
shaman’s red-haired daughter. Keen would have wanted to know more—would have
demanded it—but then the kings had come back, the living and the dead, and
everything was lost in that.

oOo

A king could not be buried at once as a simple man could,
still less thrust into the ground and forgotten like a woman. Because this one
had died so close to the great sacrifices, he was laid on his bier before the
altar-stone in the sacred place, with guards to keep off the vultures, and
priests and shamans wreathing him about with prayer and chanting and pungent
smoke. His sons were among the guards, and some among the priests, all gathered
as was proper for their father’s farewell.

All but Linden. He was taken away into a place so secret
that the women were not allowed to speak of it, though they all knew somewhat
of it. It was an old tomb, the grave of a king so ancient his name was long
since lost, who some thought might even have been a god. The young king must go
down into the earth, into the heart of the tomb, and there lie in the dark, and
lay himself open to gods and visions. Three days he would lie there, and at
moonrise of the third, come forth as if born into the world again. Then he
would be made a king before the tribes.

It was a great thing, everyone reckoned, that Linden would
come out of the tomb on the morning before the first sacrifice. It was an omen.
It foretold mighty things for him as king, that he had taken his place in so
sacred a season, before the whole of the gathered people.

The women had much to do to prepare for what would be a
greater feast than they had reckoned on. Hunters went out far and wide to bring
back meat for the feast. It had to be skinned, cleaned, readied for the fires
or the spits or the cookpots. Young girls and women free of other duties were
kept busy all day long gathering dung to feed the fires and seeking out herbs
and roots, greens and the seeds of the wild grasses; fishing in the river; and
hunting the honeycomb.

Only the king’s women did no such thing. They secluded themselves
in the tent that had been his, making his funeral garments and preparing for
their own fate. The wives would go into the tomb with him. The concubines would
go to the new king.

oOo

No one was allowed to visit them or to console them.
“They’re afraid we’ll talk sense into them,” Sparrow said as she and Keen and
some of the other young women went berry-gathering, the day before the king’s
burial.

Keen was not exactly shocked. Sparrow always said such
things, though she was usually more careful as to where she said them.
“Sometimes,” Keen said to her, pausing in stripping a bramble of its sweet red
burden, “I think you’d argue with a god if he said something you didn’t agree
with.”

“I probably would,” Sparrow said willingly. She had filled a
basket already and was beginning on the other. Her mood was odd, almost too
bright. She even hummed to herself as she worked—and Sparrow never did that.

Keen eyed her narrowly. “You’re up to something.”

Sparrow’s expression was pure innocence. “I am not.”

“You can’t go in there,” Keen said with a flash of alarm.
“You can’t convince the king’s wives to rebel. The priests would kill you, if
the rest of the men didn’t find you first.”

“What makes you think I would do that?”

“I know you,” Keen said. And she did; she was afraid,
suddenly, for this odd creature whom she called friend. “Just because you can—because
of the mare—doesn’t mean—”

“I fail to see,” said Sparrow, “why the new king can’t take
the old king’s wives. Surely they’ll serve him better alive, bearing sons to
his heir, than dead and buried in his tomb.”

“They go with him,” Keen said, a little breathless with the
shock of Sparrow’s daring. “They serve him on his journey into the sky. They
wait on him when he becomes a god-ancestor.”

“Such a life,” said Sparrow. “Condemned to servitude
forever.”

“The gods have ordained—” Keen began.

But Sparrow was not listening. Sparrow was lost in her world
again, the world that, Keen often thought, touched on this one even less than
the shadow-plain did. Sparrow did not see as other people saw. She had her
mother’s eyes. Stranger-eyes, witch-eyes.

Keen gathered sweet red berries in silence, apart from
Sparrow as from the other women. They had heard nothing of what passed between
Sparrow and Keen. They were laughing, singing, trading jests and gossip as Keen
had known how to do once. Before she went into the women’s house. Before she
was lost on the shadow-plain.

She made an effort. She laughed at a jest. She widened her
eyes at a scandal. No one rebuked her for the pretense. To them she was as she
had always been.

It was comforting, almost. It made her forget Sparrow for a
while. Then when she remembered, the place beside her was empty. Sparrow and
her brimming baskets were gone.

oOo

Sparrow was sorry that she had shocked Keen. Keen had
known her all their lives, and yet was still distressingly easy to discomfort.
When she turned away from Sparrow to indulge in the others’ silliness, Sparrow
sighed a little, but without anger. No one thought as she thought; that she had
understood long ago.

No one but a man. Sparrow considered that as she brought her
baskets back to her father’s tent. Tomorrow the king would go to his tomb, and
a dozen women with him. None of them deserved to be shut up in the dark without
escape, to die of hunger and thirst, for it was forbidden to shed the blood of
women in a holy place.

Men never questioned that. Of course they would not. They
would reckon it more than fair that twelve women died to provide one man with a
harem in the gods’ country.

Still, what could she do? No one would listen to her.
Wolfcub might, if she could find him—he was hunting, most likely, as all the
young men were, bringing down game for the cookpots—but he was too young to
have much voice among the men, even with his new title of boarslayer.

She might have given it up, not happily but perforce, if
when she came to her father’s tent her father had not been there. That was
unexpected. He had been keeping vigil over the king’s body, and would, she had
thought, till the king went to his burial. But there was Drinks-the-Wind,
sitting in front of his tent, refusing food and drink but accepting a few
moments’ rest with his head in White Bird’s lap.

“He was taken ill,” Mallard said when Sparrow emptied her
baskets into the much larger basket that would, when the women had all come
back, be full of sweet berries. “Some of the men carried him here. He’ll go
back, he insists, as soon as he’s permitted.”

Sparrow considered him from this safe distance. He was pale
but he did not look terribly ill. “Do you think someone slipped him something?”

She had not known she spoke aloud till Mallard’s brows went
up. “Do you? Why would someone do that?”

Sparrow shrugged. “There’s a new king now. This was the old
one’s friend. Someone might think the old king should have a shaman to keep him
company among the gods, along with his wives.”