Lady of Horses (21 page)

“You are a handsome thing,” she said, “after all. Who’d have
thought it?” She brushed at his coat, which was perfectly clean and had not a
wrinkle in it, and fussed with his braids till she was satisfied, then thrust
him out with little ceremony into the first pale glimmers of sunlight.

People stared at him as he walked through the camp toward
the place where he had been told to go, where he could see the others waiting
with horses and a company of priests. He held himself straight, though he would
have liked to turn hunter, sink down and seek shadows and pass unnoticed.

A king’s companion should not do that. He walked in the
light, with pride and in such beauty as he had—however great or little that
might be.

The women seemed to think he had a fair store of it. It had
never mattered before, but with the rest, it made him stand taller.

oOo

The others were all gathered when he came there, Spearhead
coming next to last and just ahead of him. Boys had caught and readied their
horses for them, brushing even Wolfcub’s dun to such sheen as he ever had, and
working the tangles out of the rough black mane. He was nearly handsome in his
slabsided way, and very full of himself, too.

Two of a kind, they were—Wolfcub could almost hear Sparrow’s
voice saying it. He grinned and slapped the stallion’s neck and swung astride.

None of them was finding it easy to mourn the fallen king.
He had been both high and remote, closer to gods than to the hearts of the
young men. This new king whom they went to greet—he was their friend, their
kinsman and their battle-brother.

They milled about for a bit without direction, while the
priests sat quiet and faceless on their horses. Wolfcub took his pattern from
that; he kept his mount still and waited.

A priest came toward them on foot from among the herds. He
led the king of stallions, brushed and scrubbed until he gleamed, in a fine
braided bridle, with a soft doeskin flung over his back. The priest led him up
to Wolfcub and held out the rein.

Wolfcub took it blindly. This was the great honor, the one
the others had been vying for: to take the stallion to his king. He caught
Bullcalf’s scowl and Spearhead’s shrug. None of them contested the choice.
“Boarslayer,” someone said, almost too soft to hear. It was both title and
explanation.

They formed in ranks then, priests ahead and behind, the
pack of companions in the middle, and Wolfcub the last of them, leading the
silvermaned stallion. He was skittish but not unreasonably so; Wolfcub gentled
him with soft words, drawing the stallion’s head toward his knee. His own
horse, sensible beast that he was, flattened an ear but offered no other
threat. The stallion took comfort from that, maybe. He followed docilely
enough.

It was not a long way to the holy place, but they took it
slowly, in processional. The priests chanted as they rode. One of them had a
drum on which he beat, stroke and stroke.

Walker Between the Worlds waited for them in the shadow of
the barrow, with a handful of shamans for escort. And it was an escort, just as
the companions would escort the new king. Walker stood tallest of them all,
with his winter beauty and his arrogant lift of the head, which he had from his
father. He was shaman born of a race of shamans, wielder of powers beyond the
reach of simple men, and well he knew it.

The silvermaned stallion snorted wetly at him. Wolfcub bit
his lip. Horses cared little for men’s pretensions to power.

Walker did not seem to understand that the stallion had been
expressing an opinion. He was deep in the importance of his position, opening
the door into the underworld, letting in the sun, and calling out in a splendid
and carrying voice: “Come forth! Come forth and be reborn.”

There was a long, breathless pause. In it, the companions
glanced at one another. Some of them had begun to be afraid. What if Linden was
dead? What if he had gone mad? Or worse—what if the gods had rejected him?

A scrabbling broke the silence: the sound of a footstep on
rough and sloping ground. A figure strode out of the darkness into the dazzle
of morning light. He stood squinting through tears of pain, erect and still
under the sky, finding his balance and his vision.

Walker took his hands. He peered at the shaman. He did not
look mad, and he was certainly not dead. He smiled, and that was purely Linden.
“Walker,” he said. His voice was rough with dryness, or perhaps disuse. “Is it
time?”

Walker nodded. “It is time. What did you see?”

Linden frowned. Whatever his days in the dark had done for
him, they had not granted him any quickness of wit. “I saw dark,” he said. “I
smelled dust and old stone. The king is down there still. He lies on the stone.
His bed—it was flowers. Long dead and gone to dust, but I smelled the ghosts of
them. They were the only ghosts that came to me. Do you know what I thought,
Walker? I thought, that’s no king. That’s a woman. They laid her to rest in a
bank of flowers.”

One of the companions snorted as if to stifle laughter. No
one else dared move or speak. Wolfcub wondered if any of them began to regret
this lovely idiot who would, by the gods’ will, be their king.

Walker betrayed neither anger nor dismay. He answered
gravely, as if Linden had been speaking sense. “My lord, that is an odd vision.
Most odd indeed. And did you dream?”

“I think so,” Linden said. “The air was full of flowers.
There was a woman. She looked like the old people, little and dark, but very
beautiful. She came to me and we did what man and woman do. She never spoke.
When she left me . . . she turned into a mare. A white mare.
Then—” He faltered.

“Then?” Walker prompted him.

His brows knit; he shook his head. “I don’t remember. It
seems the flowers all turned to arrows. And there—there were women riding on
horses. They had bows and spears. I woke up then, because it was so
preposterous. I didn’t want to dream it any more.”

Walker would have been glad not to hear it, either, Wolfcub
thought. But he mastered himself before he spoke. “This dream is most
strange—but much of it, surely, is no more than a dream. I see nothing in it
that bodes ill for you. Indeed,” he said, and his voice swelled richly and
filled with deep music, “while you were communing with the gods, they came to
me in this outer place and showed me wonders: a field of stars, and all of them
singing your name. Great and glorious king, they called you, lord of warriors,
mightiest of the People. They foretold for you a great kingship and a glorious
reign.”

That was far more to the taste of those who listened. Linden
most of all—he drew up taller as Walker spoke, and his eyes shone. “Truly?
Truly you saw that?”

“As truly,” Walker said, “as I am a shaman.”

“The king’s shaman.” Linden freed his hands from Walker’s to
rest them on the shaman’s shoulders. “Walk with me. Stand beside me while I lay
my father to his rest. Be my guide and guardian. Will you do that? Will you serve
me as the gods allow?”

“As the gods allow,” said Walker, “I will be your shaman.”

Linden’s joy was as bright as the sun, and as free of guile.
He would not have heard what Wolfcub had: that Walker would be his shaman, but
he said nothing of service. “Splendid! Oh, splendid. But first,” he said,
sobering as much as he ever could, “we have to bury my father.”

Walker inclined his head—acquiescing, it might have seemed.
But to Wolfcub’s eye, it seemed almost as if he granted his leave; as if he
allowed the king to command him.

oOo

As the young king had been brought forth in the morning,
so was the old king laid to rest in the evening. The sun was setting as Linden
came with his companions and his shaman to the sacred circle within the White
Stone camp, where the priests and all the people and the elder shaman waited
for him.

He was beautiful, riding on his black-and-silver stallion,
with his bright hair gleaming and his fine open face all pale with grief. He
mourned his father, however little it seemed to matter to anyone else that the
old king was dead. He slipped from the stallion’s back to kneel by the bier,
taking no apparent notice of the reek of death that the priests’ efforts had
failed to keep at bay. He murmured a few words—far too faint for Sparrow to
hear, crowded back among the women. It was miracle enough that she could see
him: and that was by virtue of a convenient stone, and no men nearby to tower
over her.

He bade farewell to his father and commended the old king’s
spirit to the gods. After a while he rose. At that signal, priests of the
Stallion lifted the bier on bare strong shoulders, their faceless masks and
tall maned crests making them seem like creatures out of the otherworld,
spirits come to walk among men.

They all went to the place of burial, a long winding march,
all but the young king on foot, treading earth as the people of the plain had
done since the dawn time. Women wailed and beat their breasts. The more
extravagant rent garments and tore hair, whirling and spinning as they shrieked.

The men walked silent, their faces schooled to stillness. A
warrior might weep with decorous sorrow or roar in rage, but this shrilling
clamor was a women’s thing. The death music, it was called. It opened the gate
of the world and granted the dead admittance to the far bright country. The
louder, the more deafening it was, the swifter the gate opened and the greater
his welcome.

Sparrow shrieked with the rest of them, a shrill ululation
that tore her throat at first, but after a while poured out of her without
effort, a throbbing of pure high sound. Some of the other women were doing the
same. Then others, and others, coming into harmony, matching tone and rhythm
to—why, Sparrow’s; and that was matched to the beating of blood in her veins.

All voices gathered into one voice, one great ringing peal
at the gate of the gods’ country. It carried them to the burial place, to the
open maw of the barrow, and the silent and stunned-looking priests and shamans.
There had never been a death-cry like that one. There might never be again.

All at once, as the people reached the barrow, the cry
abandoned Sparrow, left her alone and silent and rather cold in the deepening
dusk. Her ears were ringing. She could barely hear the drum that began to beat,
or the priests’ chanting, late and rather feeble, as if the death-cry had left
them reft of strength for their own part of the rite.

She was half out of herself, and not minded to return
altogether to her body. In this state she saw, oh, so clearly. The stars were
great blooming flowers in the deep blue of the sky. The people were shadows
with pale blurred faces. The torches that kindled among them and about the
barrow were dim and red, like embers.

Only the stallion, of all that stood on that earth, seemed
real. His coat was night sky flecked with stars. His mane and tail were a fall
of moonlight. Horse Goddess was not in him, but he was her child. Her blessing
washed him in light.

Sparrow watched the priests lay the king in his tomb, settle
his weapons about him and his belongings and the provisions for his journey to
his tent beyond the stars. They brought in a fine bay stallion, one of the sons
of the fallen king of stallions, and sacrificed him to the king’s spirit, laid
the body at his feet and the head above him.

Then the women came, all his wives and concubines. They were
dressed in their best tunics, with their most precious ornaments, their long
hair flowing free and crowned with flowers. They bowed before their
husband—stumbling, many of them, as if drugged with grief or a shaman’s potion.
Their faces in torchlight were blank. None uttered a sound.

They lay in the barrow, composed as if for sleep. And the
priests and all the men of the People raised the barrow over them, closing them
within, still living, still breathing, drugged nigh senseless but alive.

Not one of the old king’s women was left in the outer
world. All of them had gone to the tomb with him, every one, wife and
concubine.

Sparrow, trapped far back among the people, dazed and
stumbling with the after math of her strange song and stranger trance, could
say nothing, do nothing, prevent nothing. She was a woman of no account, the
lowest of the People. Only a newborn girlchild was less than she.

Walker had done this. He might protest that it was no decision
of his: the priests and shamans had decided it, taking no notice of any bargain
that he struck with a woman. But Walker was the great shaman, the young king’s
favorite. One word of his would have changed the law and set the women free.

Sparrow found a name for the thing that swelled inside her.
Anger. No, more than anger. Rage.

It was not only hers. Horse Goddess had spoken through her.
It had been the goddess’ will that this change be made. And the shaman had not
only disregarded it, he had made certain that every royal woman died in her
husband’s tomb, not only the wives. It was a message, and clear—as clear as the
sky full of stars, and the voices of priests and warriors singing the king to
his rest, and the night wind across the plain.

Sparrow went away with the other women, silent as they all
were, and left the men to complete the rite alone. When they came back to camp,
she did not speak to anyone. She crawled into a corner of her father’s tent,
pulled one of the sleeping-furs over her head, and vanished into darkness.

oOo

Wolfcub had been startled to see all the king’s women led
into his tomb. Even Fawn, for whom he grieved, and the redheaded woman whom
Linden had tumbled on the night Wolfcub slew the boar—every one of them.

It seemed excessive. But none of the priests raised an
objection. The shamans watched without expression. Drinks-the-Wind looked
shrunken and old, leaning on the shoulder of one of his sons.