Lady of Horses (24 page)

Keen went back to the tent that had been hers, but which
now, by the laws of marriage, she must share with another woman. It was much
improved, the stranger’s belongings removed or shifted out of the way. She sent
the servants home to their mistress, retrieved the fish that she had all but
forgotten, and set numbly to cleaning and stuffing and baking them. They would
spoil if she left them; baked, they would keep a little while at least, and she
could give most of them away.

She did not trouble to make herself beautiful. What point?
He was not coming tonight. He would be lying about in the Tall Grass camp,
being charming to his new wife’s kinsmen.

The fish were done just at sunset. Keen dug them out of the
fire and broke the clay that had baked hard over them, and emptied them into a
basket. Their scent, so rich and savory, made her stomach churn. She had no
appetite at all. The wine that her father had made her drink was heavy in her
middle, weighing down her spirit.

She covered the basket and laid it aside where camp dogs and
children could not get at it. Moving slowly, without thinking much past the
task at hand, she banked the fire and spread her sleeping-furs and lay down.

She had always slept in the outer room, in the man’s
place—beside Walker when he was there, alone when he was not. He had never
objected, indeed had said once that it was convenient; they could lie together
all night long if they chose.

She had left the flap tied open to let in such breeze as
there was. It was a still night, and warm. After a while she slipped out of her
tunic and folded it and laid it under her head. The fire without died slowly,
sinking to embers. She sank with it into a half-drowse.

Her heart was heavy, as it had been when her mother died: a
blackness, an emptiness, as if she had lost something precious. Yet all she had
done, if custom were true, was to gain a new pair of hands in the tent and in
her husband’s service—and since this was a wealthy woman, a whole flock of
servants, too. She should be glad, not so deeply angry that she could see no
way out of it.

A shadow came between her eyes and the dying fire. A small
part of her heart leaped. She knew that shape, oh, yes: slender, tall, but wide
enough in the shoulder, moving with grace that not so long ago had caught her
breath in her throat.

It still could, if she let it. Walker slipped into the tent
as he had so many times before, paused to let his eyes come clear in the
dimness, moved toward her. Her body must have glimmered, to guide him; or he
heard the sound of her breathing.

He did not greet her or speak to her. He lay down beside
her, hand reaching for her breast. It drew taut at his touch. Her belly
fluttered. Her secret place ached with wanting him.

And yet her heart was cold. He stroked her and fondled her,
and her body roused as it always had, quick as a horse to its master’s touch.
When he rose over her, she opened to him and took him inside her. They danced
the dance, treading the familiar steps, knowing each other’s rhythms and
cadences.

When they had come to the end, he did not leave her as he
usually did. He held her in his arms, a rare thing, and one she would have much
prized only a day before.

She lay still, not speaking. Her breathing quieted. The ache
in her secret place had eased a little, but not so very much. As if, she
thought, the dance of flesh on flesh was not enough. It needed something else.
Something—

“My love,” Walker said in his beautiful voice. “My wife.”

She did not respond. This was unlike him, too, even as he
had been when he first took her to wife.

“I hear,” he said, “that you sent Blossom away.”

Was that the girl’s name, then? Blossom? Keen would have
called her Ice, or Pickerel, or something equally chilly and sharp.

“I am sorry she came so soon,” he said, seeming undismayed
by her silence. He stroked her as she spoke, cupping her breast, kneading it.
She had never liked that. She had never told him so. Nor did she tell him now,
though he went on and on. “Her tribe’s custom is somewhat different from ours.
The new wife comes at her own discretion, and takes the husband’s tent for her
own.”

“And if he already has a wife?”

She spoke so low, for a moment she did not think he heard.
Then he answered, “The senior wife comes when she chooses.”

“I am senior wife.”

She felt how he stiffened. His hand tightened on her breast.
It hurt. She set her teeth and endured. “My love,” he said in a tone she had
never heard him use in this place before, though she had heard it often when he
spoke before the People. “My sweet and golden lady. You are first wife and will
always be. But her father is shaman of the Tall Grass people. She has always
expected to be chief wife in her husband’s tent.”

“My father,” said Keen, “is king’s brother of the White
Stone people.”

“The old king’s brother,” Walker said. “That day is past, my
love. Flint is an old man. His powers have waned. Blossom’s father is in the
prime of his life, at the height of his strength. The Tall Grass king is his
sister’s son. His brother is the hunter of the tribe. He offers a great
alliance, and great gifts not only to me but to our new king and to the People.
So you see,” said Walker as if there were nothing more reasonable, “if his daughter
requires that she be chief wife, then she will be. It need matter little to
you. All the burdensome things you did, her servants will do. Keeping the tent,
scraping the hides, cooking the meals—all done for you now. You can be free to
do as you please. I’ve asked her to be kind to you, to be your friend. Haven’t
you always wanted a friend?”

Keen had to struggle to breathe slowly, to be calm. There
was so much to answer that she chose to answer only the last: “I have friends.”

“But not a sister-wife, a woman to share the tent and divide
the tasks. You’re angry now, I can tell—you’re jealous. Don’t be. I’ve love
enough for both of you.”

Or for none.
For
some reason, Keen heard that in Sparrow’s voice. She was seeing Walker again as
Sparrow must see him: cold, cruel, blind to anything but his own wishes. And
yet her father, who was neither cold nor cruel, had been just as blind.

“What,” she said, “if I had done the same? If I’d gone out,
found another husband, made him lord of this tent—would you be wiling to accept
it?”

“Of course not!” he said at once. “That’s outrageous. A
woman belongs to one man, and one man only.”

“And yet,” she said, “you take away my rank, you cast down
my father’s honor, you order me to step aside for a stranger. You would never
permit it if I were to do the same.”

“Because,” said Walker, still with that air of preeminent
reason, “a woman does not do such things. She is made to serve one man, as men
are made to rule many women. That is the gods’ law.” He rose over her. His face
was a pale glimmer, with shadowed eyes. Her hands, clenched by her sides,
remembered the strong clean planes of it, the softness of his young man’s
beard, the way his lips would set a kiss in her palm as it passed by.

She put that memory aside. He, like her father, spoke
perfect sense, sense as the People had known it for time out of mind. Men did
not share wives, unless they were kings; and then they chose who would lie with
their women. Women shared husbands. That was the way of it. And if the first
wife was not so highly ranked as one who came after, she stepped aside as she
was bidden, because that was a woman’s lot.

Keen had never minded that she was a woman. Sparrow
complained constantly, condemning this unfairness or that—never wishing she
could be a man, certainly not, but just as certainly declaring that a woman
should be able to do all that a man could. Sparrow was odd and outspoken, and
was going to suffer terribly if she was not careful.

Keen had never minded, either, that as a child she could do
so much more than she could do as a woman. Once her courses came, she was
content to put on the long tunic and put up her hair and wait to be given to a
husband. Keeping his tent, warming his bed, bearing his children when they
came—she had taken joy in all of that.

Even when she thought of sharing with other wives: well, and
every woman did, sooner or later.

Sooner had come, and before she expected it. Walker was only
doing what was best for his fortunes, and no doubt for the People. She should
be schooling herself to accept it.

She could not. This was not right. The way he had done it,
without a word to her—coming to her after it was done and breeding her like a
heifer and thinking that that would be enough to soften her heart.

It was being alone that had done it, waking from her
blood-red dream to find all the People gone and herself forgotten. Walker had
never come to her, not once, until tonight.

It did not matter that there were reasons for it, reasons
that would seem important to a man. Keen was not a man. She had lost a child.
Her heart had needed him to make it whole, and he had been finding himself a
new wife.

She was a very selfish, small-minded, unreasonable person.
She knew that. She could not make herself care.

Walker took her silence, maybe, for acquiescence. He stooped
to kiss her. If he felt the cold passivity of her lips, he did not speak of it.
He fondled her breast again, a touch that made her flinch inside, then rose.
His voice came down from far above her. “There, my love, I know; it’s always
difficult the first time, even knowing what the gods have willed for us. You’ll
come to love her. She’ll be your sister and your friend. You’ll see.”

Keen said nothing, which in the end was her only refuge. He
seemed to have expected it. He turned and slipped out, striding away into the
night.

When he was well gone, Keen rose in her own turn. She found
and shook out her tunic and put it on. She gathered a few things, finding them
by touch in the dark, and tied them into a bundle. With that in hand, she slipped
out as he had, and went where her feet saw fit to take her.

Sparrow had avoided going to the women’s house for a
handful of months now. She had found that if she gathered up certain things and
put on a certain air and walked out without stealth, she could gain herself a
handful of days with the mare, and never be missed at all.

It should have been even easier in gathering, with so many
tribes and so many houses, and women wandering from one to the next as it
pleased them. But when Sparrow woke on the sixth day of the sacrifices to the
familiar ache and ruddy flow, sought the basket with the necessities, and
slipped out, she found herself accosted by no less than White Bird, her
father’s odd but undeniably lovely wife.

White Bird had never had any use for Sparrow. But this
morning; for some reason best known to herself, she held up her own basket and
said brightly, “You, too? Come, we’ll share the days together!”

Sparrow barely restrained herself from glancing about to see
if Walker was watching. How would he know to thwart her so? The gods well
might, but them she could not see, not with her daytime eyes.

There was no help for it. She had to go to the hut that the
White Stone women had raised. It was set upstream of the camp on the little
river, well out of sight and sound of the sacred places. There were two other
women sitting outside of it, one of the White Stone, one of the Red Deer who
had been born to the White Stone. She was a tireless gossip, and she knew every
scandal.

She was chattering when Sparrow and White Bird came, and she
did not stop chattering, day or night. By the third day, they knew the
arrangement of each and every basket in her husband’s tent, what was in it and
how much, where each wife slept and on what kind of fur, how many children they
had, what their names were, and precisely how large and of what shape was the
organ of the man who had sired them all. “Or most of them,” said Magpie, “if
you’re charitable.”

Sparrow thought she might go mad. She wanted to be away from
here, free on the plain, riding the mare—and maybe watching over Linden from
afar, though that would not be easy. Yet she was trapped by her body and her
kinswomen. When Magpie was not chattering, White Bird was babbling of the
spells she would cast and the songs she would sing, so that next month she
would not be in the women’s house, she would be growing a son in her belly.

The third woman, Redwing, at least was quiet. From what
little she said, her husband was thinking of sending her back to her father for
her failure to bear him a son, though she had given him four daughters. He had
refused to name all of them, every one—as he refused to name the daughters his
other wives gave him. None of them had given him a son.

Sparrow tried to imagine a woman whose arms were so empty,
who had carried and birthed four children, and each one had been taken away to
be given to the wolves. White Bird, whose daughter was growing up lusty and
strong and completely unacknowledged by her mother, would not hear Redwing’s
story. She ran straight over it with her sweet breathless voice. “I shall bear
a son in the spring. You’ll see. It’s all prepared. As soon as I leave this
place, I’ll start the spells.”

Redwing shut her mouth and did not open it again. Magpie
began to chatter anew. Sparrow shut her eyes and prayed for an end to it.

oOo

She endured it for close on four days. Redwing left late
on the third, no doubt with enormous relief. As if Redwing’s silence had served
to quench the full spate of her chatter, Magpie redoubled her efforts to deafen
her companions.

By dawn of the fourth day, Sparrow had had enough. She was
not done with her courses. She did not care. Magpie was chattering in her
sleep. White Bird was babbling, it seemed, to herself. Sparrow simply walked
away.

Magpie slept on undisturbed. White Bird might be awake, but
her eyes in the firelight were blank. Neither of them called Sparrow back.