Lady of Horses (28 page)

He had no such gifts, and yet he could swear that he felt something
there. A warmth beyond her body’s warmth, a presence apart from her own.

She arched under his hand, shifting it till it rested much
lower. She rocked gently, almost lazily, and with an expression of pure
wickedness.

“Insatiable,” he said. “And wanton. Did you actually come
from camp like this?”

“Will you be shocked if I say yes?”

“Nothing you do can shock me.”

Her brow arched. She looked remarkably like the king, just
then. “Truly? Then it seems I have work to do.”

“Not tonight,” he said. Her rocking quickened. He matched
it. She spasmed against his hand, locking about it, till with a sigh she subsided.

He reclaimed his hand. She stretched along the length of
him, head on his shoulder, and toyed with his manly organ. It was too early for
that to revive, though it would have been glad to try.

She was all but asleep, he thought, until she said, “Cloud.”

“Rain,” he said, naming her as she had named him.

“Cloud,” she said again, “Horse Goddess lives in the moon.
Remember that.”

She was asleep after all, and dreaming. Her voice had that
sound to it. “I’ll remember,” he said to her.

“And remember,” she said, still in her dream, “that the moon
can come down to earth. A woman rides her. A man pursues her. He thinks he can
destroy her. But no man can harm a goddess.”

“That, too,” he said, “I’ll remember.”

And he would. When Rain spoke so, she spoke true.

Wolfcub stood on the bank of the river that marked the
southernmost border of the tribes’ lands. The ford to which he had come was
much marked with prints of wild deer and boar and antelope and the beasts that
preyed on them, even the vast deep tracks of a herd of aurochs. There were
tracks of horses, too, a wild herd that he had seen not long before, winding up
a hill in search of better grazing.

Amid all the rest, he had found what he looked for: two
horses of good size and rounder hoof than was common in this country, each
carrying the weight of a woman. His quarry had come this way, paused to drink,
then forded the river.

He had tracked them from quarter moon to quarter moon.
Tonight it began again to swell to the full. Spearhead was still with him, no
longer contemptuous of women’s strength, or of their hunting skill either.

Wolfcub, who had taught these two everything his father had
taught him, often caught himself regretting it. They had been apt pupils—delighting
him then, defeating him now. And they were mounted on faster horses.

He squatted on his heels and dipped a handful of water, then
another, quenching his thirst. Within arm’s reach was the place where Sparrow
had done the same. He brushed his finger over her tidy print, broader than
Keen’s but smaller. A glimmer of her presence came with it, a memory of her
face—and memory, too, of a round brown breast, glimpsed once when he caught her
swimming near spring camp. She had caught him watching her, had made no move to
hide, but finished coming out of the water. It was he who had averted his eyes
and fled before he saw more than a flash of breasts and belly and thighs.

He sighed. Spearhead crouched beside him and drank as he had
done, but seemed not to see the print. He had seen the horses’ marks, and the
droppings that they had left, which was good tracking in its own right. “Do we
go on?” he asked.

Wolfcub wet his hands again and laved his face. He tilted
his head back, letting water run from his beard down his neck, cooling his
breast. “Do you want to go back?”

“Not without the stallion,” Spearhead said.

Wolfcub nodded. “Bad enough that we’ve taken this long. If
we come back empty-handed, what do you wager we’ll do worse than be booted out
of the companions?”

“We’ll find ourselves marching afoot and waiting on the
women.” Spearhead spoke dispassionately. He was not one to shrink from the
truth. “Or more likely we’ll go as escort for these horsethieves when they’re
sent to the gods’ tribunal.”

“You don’t think Linden’s anger would have cooled?”

Spearhead snorted. “Even if his could—and the way he thinks
of that horse, it’s not anything I’d lay wagers on—the People wouldn’t let him.
That’s their strength running away southward, stolen by a pair of women.”

“Stolen by a white mare.” They had had that argument before.
Spearhead shook his head, but for once did not try to contend that a mare could
not steal a stallion. Stallions stole mares and human folk stole horses.

Wolfcub thrust himself to his feet and stretched, groaning a
little. He had run afoul of a lion—fortunately a young one, and solitary—hunting
the same herd of deer. The marks of its claws were healing. The claws
themselves hung about his neck, all but a pair that he had insisted Spearhead take,
and the lionskin was the dun’s new saddlecloth.

Spearhead, who had brought down a fine doe before he
realized that Wolfcub was entangled with a lion, had come in time to weaken the
lion with a well-aimed arrow. Wolfcub had dispatched it then with his spear.
And now he was lionkiller as well as boarslayer, which was surely the gods’
jest.

He did not want to cross the river. He wanted to go home,
crawl into his father’s tent, rest his head in his mother’s lap, and sleep until
the world passed away. Kings and shamans, death and revenge, boars, lions,
mares, stallions, women whom the gods drove mad—all gone. All vanished.

He was bound. He had to go.

He called his stallion. The dun came a little reluctantly:
he had found a patch of sweet grass. He brought a trailing mouthful with him,
and finished it as Wolfcub mounted and turned him toward the river.

Sparrow’s great worry on the long flight, that Keen would
sicken and fail, proved entirely misplaced. The longer they rode, the farther
away from the People they went, the straighter Keen sat on the mare’s back, and
the clearer her eyes became.

The shadow that had been on her was still there, but it had
sunk deep. She was close to her old self again, the bright and laughing child
who had run as wild as a boy until her courses came. She had decided to be a
woman then, a creature of long skirts and lowered eyes, and nothing that
Sparrow could do would shift her.

They forded the river amid a herd of antelope, who jostled
one another but did not flee the horses—strange thing, for these beasts must
have known the terror of men on horseback. But it seemed they recognized the
mare for what she was, and had no fear of her companions.

Past the river, they rode for a while up a long slope to a
broad green level, then down into a rolling country where, for the first time,
they saw little thickets of trees marking the courses of streams. Trees were
not a thing the People knew a great deal of. There were few on the plain, and
none that a woman was allowed to approach, for like horses they were sacred to
the men’s gods.

oOo

Keen would not go past the first small wood, not until she
had entered it and stood in light that was all strange: dappled green and gold,
and bounded with the trunks of trees. She looked like a tree herself, slender
and tall, arms raised over her head, swaying in the wind that blew off the open
country.

She was quite outrageously beautiful. Sparrow smiled to see
her. Even if she died for what she had done, she would die knowing that, for at
least a while, Keen had been happy.

But when they rode on, Keen’s face was somber, her gaze
turned inward. It was some while before she said what burdened her mind. “Do
you think anyone’s followed us this far?”

Sparrow stroked the stallion’s neck. He arched it under her
touch, and leaned into it as she rubbed the spot he loved best. He was neither
goddess nor soul’s self, but she had grown greatly fond of him as he carried
her uncomplaining day after day. It never troubled him that he had abandoned
kingship and power to be a lone mare’s servant.

But men never let go so easily. “They’ll think we stole the
king,” Sparrow said. “I hope they followed one of our false tracks, or lost us
in the herds that have so obligingly crossed our path. But if any one of them
is hunter enough to see through all that . . .”

“Wolfcub,” Keen said.

Sparrow’s lips tightened. “Yes.”

“He wouldn’t, would he? He’d have to kill us.”

“Yes.”

Keen shivered. But she kept her chin up. Her voice was firm.
“Wolfcub would never do that. Even for king or shaman.”

“For king or shaman he would do it,” Sparrow said. “His
honor wouldn’t let him do otherwise.”

Keen shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

Sparrow shrugged. Keen could believe or disbelieve. It did
not change the truth.

She had been dreaming of Wolfcub. It was odd, because such
dreams had the clarity of true dreams, but she knew they could not be. In some
of the dreams, he was hunting her. That was true—her spirit knew it. He and
another man, taller than he and thinner, with a brown beard. But the other dreams,
the ones that were even clearer, must be some jest of the gods.

In those dreams, there was no hunt, no revenge, no killing.
The two of them were doing quiet things, ordinary for the most part: sitting by
a fire sharing a bowl of something savory, or walking along a riverbank, or
riding side by side, she on the mare, he on his ugly little dun.

Always in those dreams, she was deeply, utterly content. She
would wake from them with warmth in her heart that lingered even after she
remembered where she was and how she had come there.

And then there was the dream she had had last night. It
began much like the others: the fire, the bowl. It was venison, she remembered,
stewed with herbs and roots. The taste of it came to her even in memory.

But after they had eaten it, he had risen and held out his
hand. And she, in the dream, had taken it.

They had gone into a tent that reminded her vaguely of his
father’s and somewhat of the king’s. There he had turned to her, and the look
in his eyes was unmistakable. Nor was her dream-self astonished. Wolfcub who in
waking had treated her always like a sister, never as a woman, in the dream was
all passionate, and all lover.

She had seen him naked. Of course she had. Somehow, in this
place of her dream, he was different.

He was older, yes, than he had been the last time she saw
him as bare as a peeled wand, leaping into the river amid a crowd of naked
boys. His body fit itself. It was lean but graceful, the lines of it carved
clean, like the lines of his face. It was a man’s body, strong and eager.

And she was eager for him, a warmth between her legs and in
her heart that she had not known before. It was she who closed the space
between them, took him in her arms and drew him down into heaped furs. Her
dream-self knew very well what to do there, though her waking self had never
lain with a man in that way. No man had wanted her, nor had she wanted any of
them.

Except Linden; and she had always known that he was not for
her. This man she lay with in dream was not Linden, and yet he was beloved. And
beautiful—oh, he was that. Not like Linden, all sunlight and ruddy good humor,
but a longer, leaner, more deliciously dangerous beauty.

Strange to think of her childhood friend so, and yet he was.
He walked like a young lion, and he was strong, with effortless strength.

When she woke, her body was thrumming, as if she had indeed
taken a lover in the night. But there was no one about except Keen, curled
tight like a little child, sound asleep; and the horses standing nose to tail.
Wolfcub was far away. She doubted very much that he dreamed of her, except as a
memory of grief.

oOo

Wolfcub dreamed of Sparrow as he lay in camp on the far
side of the river. It was not the first time he had done so, nor did he expect
it to be the last. In dreams she knew what she was to him, and she was glad.
She loved him as he doubted she ever would in waking. And if he had to kill her
in order to take back the stallion . . .

Even dreaming, he could not set that thought aside. He
turned his dream aside instead, and let it wander where it would, if only it
was away from her.

The night had not cooled more than a little. Morning brought
with it a breathless heat, the sun hanging motionless in a pallid sky. Even the
buzzing gnats were sluggish, and the horses had no speed in them. They plodded
through dry and hissing grass. There were trees—they tracked the women to a
thicket and out again, and onward across the rolling green country.

The heat rose with the day. At noon they paused in the shade
of a wood, though flies tormented them. There was water from a stream, and
relief for a while from the sun.

Wolfcub was tempted to stay, but he did not like the look of
the sky. He would rather be out in the open if it turned as ugly as he feared.
Clouds had begun to heap overhead, one atop the other, white as curds, but as
they thickened, they darkened. The horizon to the south was blue-black.

oOo

The storm struck midway between noon and sunset. Even as
long as he had been waiting for it, when it came, it came with appalling
suddenness. One moment they trudged onward in the searing sunlight. The next, the
world was black and roaring and shot with lightnings.

They flung themselves from their horses, covering with their
bodies whatever they could, and weapons most of all. The skies opened. Thunder
pealed. Lightning smote the earth again and again. The gods’ wrath buffeted
them. The rain nigh drowned them. Hail battered them, stinging unprotected
skin.

At last the lightning strode away, and the thunder rolled
with it. Rain fell still, but more gently, soaking the parched earth.

Wolfcub rose to his knees. He was shivering—his tunic was
dry underneath him, but his back and shoulders were bare. He pulled on the
tunic and looked about.