Lady of Horses (31 page)

Some of those sent away returned quickly with a tent, which
they raised beside the king’s, rolling and binding the sides so that it was no
more, for the moment, than a canopy. In that fashion it sheltered the stranger
from the sun but let in ample light.

Cloud was no shaman, but his mother had taught him what she
knew of healing. He had a gift for it that Storm said was a kind of magic. But
wounds like these, old and suppurating, were not anything he was delighted to
contend with.

Storm helped him settle the stranger on a clean hide,
raising her brows at the stained and bloodied lionskin that had wrapped him,
folding it and handing it to one of the men who hung about. “Clean this,” she
said.

He was none too happy to be dismissed, but he went
obediently. People always obeyed Storm when she was in this mood.

Cloud and Storm together relieved the stranger of his
leggings and took off his necklace and his armlets, laying them aside. By the
time he was naked, warm water had come, and the wherewithal to bathe him and
dry him.

While Storm washed his hair, Cloud studied the wounds. Now
that they were clean, they were if anything uglier than before.

“Cautery?”

Cloud glanced over his shoulder. Rain stood just behind him
with a basket in her hands. Cloud took it from her. Salves and potions would
not be enough for this. But to burn away the diseased flesh . . .

Maybe he would need to do that. But there was a thing he
could do first. It would not be pretty. He would have to pray that the stranger
did not wake and run shrieking from it.

His mother had known. Some of the wilder children, at her
behest, had brought what he needed from the refuse-heaps, white and wriggling
and hungry for carrion. Flinching a little with revulsion, Cloud spread maggots
like a poultice over the worst of the wounds, those that had begun to blacken
on the edges. The others he treated with a less revolting salve, leaving them
all open, as unlovely as they were.

It seemed precious little to do, but when he thought of
other, more seemly things—bandages, bindings, poultices of mud or herbs or
dung—the gift in him, that his mother called his magic, turned away in refusal.
This if anything would bring the stranger back to life.

“And pray he doesn’t make us regret it,” Cloud muttered.

Rain’s brows went up. “Why? Did he try to kill you before he
fell over?”

“No,” Cloud said. “Not at all. He seemed a very polite sort,
for a man near dead. But if he is what he looks like—”

“That is a horseman from beyond the river,” said Storm. She
said it perfectly calmly. “Are his eyes blue?”

“Grey,” said Cloud, “like rain”—just as Rain burst out, “How
can a man have blue eyes?”

“Or grey?” Storm slapped her lightly. “Don’t be foolish,
child. Horsemen are sun-people. Their hair is as often yellow as not, or sunset
red. Their eyes are sky-colored, or the color of rain.”

“This one’s hair is brown, but almost red,” Rain said. “Like
a hawk’s tail.”

“Sparrowhawk,” Storm said.

“Kestrel,” said Rain. “I shall call him Kestrel.”

“He probably already has a name,” Cloud pointed out.

She tossed her head. “I’ll wager that name is Kestrel.
Doesn’t he look like one? Such a lovely beaky face, and that ruddy hair.”

Cloud sighed. When Rain took it into her head to name
something, nothing would possibly do but that name, forever after. He had only
escaped that headstrong magic of hers because his mother had named him when he
was small, and refused to allow Rain to change it.

This man, this Kestrel, whatever he had been before, was
going to wake and find himself made new, with a new name and, Cloud prayed to
the gods of healing, new strength. And, alas, new scars; but there was no
helping that. They were not on his face, at least, or on a limb, to weaken the
use of it.

There was nothing now but to wait and watch, to pour gruel
and potions into him, and to take care that he neither shifted nor took harm
from lying so long on his side. They took watches through the night and the day
thereafter, the three of them and their kin, and anyone else who came under
Storm’s stern eye.

He did not die at once, as Cloud had feared he would. He
still could die, and quickly; but for that night at least, he would live.

Wolfcub swam in and out of a black dream. Somewhere in it
he paused in sunlight by the rushing of a river and looked up into the face of
a stranger. It was a man, dressed much as he himself was, but unmistakably
foreign: short but broad in the shoulders, with warm brown skin and a pelt of
curly hair. The man spoke to him, and it seemed he understood, but he could not
afterward remember what they had said.

The sunlight went away, but the man was somehow present,
still with him in the dark. Then there were other people, women shorter and if
anything broader than the man, with curling black hair and round lovely
faces—women, indeed, like Sparrow. But she was nowhere in his dream. Nowhere at
all.

oOo

He woke with a start. It was his dream again, the
sunlight, the man with his curling beard and his broad black-furred chest. But
this time Wolfcub could have sworn he was awake. A great lassitude was on him,
and pain like a hand clenched tight about his ribs.

He stared at the man, who stared back with calm dark eyes.
They were rather wonderful eyes, like Sparrow’s: clear and penetrating, with a
light in them that he had always thought must be the spark of magic.

“Am I alive?” Wolfcub asked, searching for the words in
trader-tongue.

It was not what he had meant to say, nor did it make any
sense, but the stranger did not seem to think him odd for saying it. He
answered, “You do seem to be. Do you feel dead?”

“I feel . . .” Wolfcub tried to move, but his
breath caught. No; he was not ready for that yet. “I feel as if a lion mauled
me and left me for dead.”

“Actually,” said the stranger, “I think you killed the
lion.”

Wolfcub could not sigh, either. It made his ribs cry for
mercy. “I suppose I did. It’s not what I set out to do. I was hunting something
safer.”

The stranger laughed: sharply, as if it had been startled
out of him. “By the Mother Goddess! You don’t talk like a wild raider of the
steppe at all. Are you a foundling, then? A wanderer from some country we’ve
never heard of?”

“I’m a hunter of the White Stone People,” Wolfcub said,
somewhat cautiously. “I come from north of the river. If that makes me a wild
raider of the steppe—yes, I am that. Will you kill me for it?”

“We’d have done that already, if we were going to,” said an
altogether new voice. It belonged to a woman, and a young, proud, delightfully
forward one, too. She was as dark as the man, with the same curling hair and
round face, and she was dressed just as he was, in embroidered leggings and
necklace of colored stones. Her breasts were round and full, the nipples dark
and very large.

Just as Wolfcub reflected on how like Sparrow she was, it
dawned on him that his leggings were nowhere near him, nor was there any
covering on him at all. She could see clearly what he thought of her: for all
the weakness that beset him, one part of him was able and willing to rise for
her. Not as high as it might, or as proud as it could, but high enough to be
properly mortifying.

She smiled with profound sweetness. “I thank you,” she said.
“And a fair morning to you, man of the White Stone People. I have decided that
you are Kestrel—the hawk with the ruddy tail, the sparrowhawk. Tell me that
your people call you that, too.”

“I can’t,” he said. “They call me the Wolfcub.” And the boarslayer
and no doubt, if he ever came home, the lionkiller. But he did not say that.

That astonishing creature shook her head firmly. “You are
not a wolf, nor his cub, either. Not you. You are a swift creature of the air—a
falcon. A Kestrel.”

He found that he was gaping. He shut his mouth.

The man, who had listened with an air of high amusement,
said in the silence, “You’d do as well to give in now as later, stranger. Once
Rain names a thing, that thing stays named. Regardless of what it called itself
before.”

“But I am not—” Wolfcub began. But he broke off. Not because
he had surrendered—because a movement had caught his eye, something flitting
past against the sunlight. A shape like—a falcon?

A small falcon, but swift. It swooped over him—into the
place in which he lay, which seemed to be a tent without walls but with a roof
of tanned leather—and came to rest just above him, where two poles joined to
hold up the roof. It tilted its head at him, and fixed him with a wild yellow
eye.

He shivered as a man must when he faces a god, or a god’s
messenger. But he was not willing to give up the name his father had given him.
Not though it was a child’s name, and he was a man. He had kept it when he took
his manhood, because no other name was given him, nor did one come to him.

Because he had waited for this?

“See,” said the woman named Rain. “You are Kestrel. There is
the face of your spirit. Isn’t it a handsome one? Be swift, as he is. Be fair.
Be made new in this world.”

He shivered again. When he tried to think of himself as
Wolfcub, his mind blurred. But he was not Kestrel yet. He was no one.

Strong hands took his. They were not the woman’s, which
somewhat surprised him. The man said, “There. It’s a lot for your strength.
Sleep now, and grow strong. When you wake, you’ll truly be made new.”

“Or dead,” he said—Wolfcub, Kestrel, whoever he was.

“Not dead,” the man said firmly. In his way he was as
forthright as the woman, and as determined that the world should go as he
wished it. “Now sleep.”

oOo

Kestrel slept—not like the dead; he was alive, and by
Earth Mother would stay so. Cloud glared at Rain. “And no thanks to you,
either,” he said. “What did you do that for? Couldn’t you see he was too weak
to carry a new name?”

“He’s stronger than you think,” Rain said, unrepentant. “Isn’t
he beautiful? Those eyes—they’re marvelous. And so,” she added wickedly, “is a
certain other part of him.”

Cloud was not about to deny that. But he said, “You
embarrassed him horribly.”

“Didn’t I? He’s such a modest creature—who’d have thought
it? He makes me think of the Long River boys: so shy and yet so sweet. They’re
wonderfully bold in the inner tent, once you get them there. I wonder . . .
?”

“That,” said Cloud, “you’ll not be finding out tonight, or
for a fair number of nights after. He’s a long road still to ride before he’s
strong again.”

“I’ll help him,” Rain said.

“Not that way.”

“Not,” said Rain, “until he’s ready. No.”

Cloud eyed her in mistrust, but she was all limpid
sincerity. There was little he could do but sigh and hope she meant it.

oOo

The man who had been Wolfcub, who was now named Kestrel,
slept and woke and slept again, a blur of waking and dream. When he was awake,
people fed him and made him drink—water sometimes, but more often mixtures of
strange tastes, pungent and sweet, bitter and salt. The man was often there;
Kestrel learned that his name was Cloud. The woman, Rain, who declared herself
to be a shaman, came and went. Sometimes there were others, small dark people
like the rest. None of those would speak to him; they averted eyes and did
whatever was necessary and left.

They were keeping him drugged, he understood early on, but
he lacked the will to fight it. It was to help him heal, Cloud said. Cloud was
the healer, and also a prince of the tribe—not its king, but king-heir.

The king never came. A woman did, one very like Rain, but
not her mother; Rain addressed her as “
A
unt.”
She was Cloud’s mother, and she was a woman of great presence and clear
strength.

Like Rain she had no modesty as women of the tribes knew it;
sometimes she wore a tunic as a woman should, but equally often she appeared in
leggings or in a kilt of fine white leather embroidered with swirling signs.
There were like signs circling her breasts and her ample belly,
like—king-marks?

She was the king. She was also the shaman of the tribe, and
Rain was her apprentice. Cloud was her heir.

It was most strange. Women and men walked freely together
here. There seemed to be nothing that either did not do. He saw women coming in
from the hunt, and men tending children—though none made shift to nurse an
infant.

Sparrow would love these people. Women rode horses, too,
sturdy grey horses with remarkable grace in movement, such horses as Kestrel
had seen in the royal herd of his own people. But none of those greys was
Sparrow’s mare, nor was there any sign of her, any suggestion at all that these
people knew of her.

Why he should think there might be, he could not imagine. He
had long since lost her trail. He was not even sure where he was, except that
he was south of the river—far south of it, if he could trust his memory.
Sometimes he thought he truly had died and was gone among the gods—and such
gods, too, these dark lively people who seemed to laugh as easily as they
spoke.

oOo

They were mortal enough. Someone died while he lay
mending, a very old man, who seemed to have been much revered. That night one
of the half-grown boys stayed with him, sullenly, while everyone else took the
body and wrapped it in a horsehide and carried it away. Whatever rite they
practiced, however they entrusted their dead to the gods, he was not to see.
The next day they came back, walking quietly, and returned to the business of
living.

As indeed should he. Their potions were growing weaker as he
grew stronger. The day came when he happened to be left alone for a few moments
in a changing of the guard. He had been measuring a tentpole for some days,
judging its strength.