Lady of Horses (32 page)

It was strong enough for him to pull himself up. He was
barely strong enough to do that, or to stand gasping and with his sight growing
dark, till he had to let go or pull the tent down with him.

When he could see again, he looked up at Cloud, who stood as
tall as a hill above him. “Good,” Cloud said. “You did it yourself. I was
pondering ways to force you.”

Kestrel blinked. He was stupid with exhaustion, but Cloud
pulled him up. He already knew how strong that short broad man was; stronger by
far than Kestrel. Nor would he let Kestrel rest till he had walked, on his feet
though leaning on Cloud’s wide shoulders, back to his too-familiar bed.

After that Kestrel was to get up whenever he could, and if
he lay too long, Cloud or Rain or even the king would come to drag him up and
make him walk. First around the tent, then to the fire and back, and thereafter
by greater distances until he had circled the whole camp and begun to explore
the fields and woods about it.

oOo

Summer had passed while he lay healing. Autumn had come:
warm red-golden days, crisp chill nights. As soon as he was up and walking, he
was given garments to wear, made to his measure for he was taller and narrower
than people here: leggings, tunic, and his lionskin cleaned and much more adeptly
tanned than he had managed to do on the hunt. It was a beautiful thing now,
supple and tawny-gold. He had his necklace back, too, and his armlets that he
had taken from the boar.

He did not fancy himself overmuch, though he was well and
properly clothed. He had lost flesh terribly in his sickness. His side and back
were deeply scarred. Cloud gave him an ointment to soften the scars and keep
him from stiffening on that side.

He would have been gladder of that if Rain had not been so
eager to help him. He had come to understand that she was, if not Cloud’s wife,
then his woman. They slept in the king’s tent, close to the wall of the one in
which Kestrel lay, and there was no mistaking what they did together.

And yet she was terribly free of herself with Kestrel. That
she ran about half-naked seemed to be common and accepted for women of these
people, but none of the others made herself so evident to Kestrel as this one
did. If she was feeding him or pouring a potion for him, she always found a way
to brush his arm with her breast, or to stand so close that he could not move
without touching her.

She loved to touch him: combing and plaiting his hair while
he was still too weak to do it, brushing his cheek with her fingers, resting
her hand on his shoulder or his arm. More than once she slid her hand down his
arm till her fingers were wound with his, easily, as a child will, but those
eyes were no child’s.

The ointment was a difficulty. He could salve his ribs well
enough, but his back was hard to reach, between tightness and old pain. If
Cloud was about, Kestrel could ask him to help, but Cloud never seemed to be
nearby when Kestrel needed him. Rain, on the other hand, never seemed to be
elsewhere. She loved to find him struggling with the sweetly pungent stuff,
snatch it from his hand and work it into his back and sides with skilled
fingers.

They were very skilled, and adept at working strongly but
without pain. But they tended to stray. They wandered up along his shoulders,
which was not so bad; but they also wandered down and round until, if he was
not deeply wary, they had found his rod. It of course by then was defiantly
erect. It did not care that she was another man’s woman.

But his spirit did, and his good sense. He always found a
way to shift away from her, to elude her hand; but one day when the apples were
full ripe in the wood near the hill, she would not let him escape. When he
turned to remonstrate, she had rid herself of her leggings, and knelt boldly
naked. His movement, by his accident and her design, brought him up against her
body.

She laughed, rich and warm, and gripped him tight before he
could recoil. His rod was trapped between them, escaped from its leggings—her
doing, too. Deftly and utterly wickedly, she mounted him where he knelt.

His heart thudded in horror. But his rod was wild with
delight. She was hot inside, hot and sweet, clasping him like a wonderful
strong hand. She knew very well what to do and how to do it. She bore him back
and down, driving him deep inside her, with a gasp and a shudder of pure animal
pleasure.

He could only be glad, with the last fading glimmer of
sense, that they had long since lowered the walls of this tent which they had
given him. He was not forced to couple in full view of the camp. But anyone who
passed by could hear—for he was grimly mute, but she was making no secret of it
at all.

All the while his mind babbled in terror, his body took
everything she gave and returned it joyfully. He had no power to resist her.
She was a shaman. Whatever she wished for, she had.

She did not take him and use him and abandon him as a man
might a woman. When she had brought him to a roar of release, she held him
inside her for as long as his slackening member would stay there, then sat
astride him still, rocking gently, regarding him with enormous contentment.
“You,” she said, “are a beautiful man. You don’t really know that, do you? So
many men do. But you don’t believe it.”

He was in no condition to banter with her, or indeed to
speak at all. She did not seem to mind. She brushed her breasts across his
breast, sliding down the length of him. “Smooth,” she said. “Like a boy. Except
here.” She had it in her hand again, but gently, as if it were a bird lifted from
the nest. “And here.” Her fingers raked his beard, lightly, combing it smooth.
“Are all of you so lightly furred?”

That, too, he could not answer. He was wondering when Cloud
would come, and how the prince-heir would kill him. Cloud seemed a
mild-mannered man, but Kestrel had seen him come back from a hunt with the hide
and meat of a bear. Cloud was as strong as that bear, and deadly skilled with
bow and spear.

While he lay speechless, Rain explored his body. She was
like a child with a new toy, searching out all its secrets. She found the mark
on his shoulder like a tiny splayed hand. She kissed that—irresistibly, she
said. She loved the freckling on his arms and legs and across his shoulders,
and over his nose, too: sun-kisses, she called them. She measured his limp
hands against hers, marveling at how narrow they were, and yet so long, and
strong enough when he was not frozen with fear of what her man would do to him.

When she took his hand and laid it over her breast, then at
last he found his voice, if not his strength. “No,” he said.

She widened her eyes.

“No. I can’t do that. Your husband—”

“I don’t have a husband,” said Rain.

“Your man, then. Your—”

“My man? Can one person own another?”

“Cloud,” Kestrel said in desperation. “Whatever he is. The
man you lie with at night. What will he do when he finds us? Geld me? Kill me?”

She stared in flat astonishment. “Why in the world would he
want to do that?”

“Because you belong to him. Because—”

“I do not belong to him. He does not belong to me.” She
paused. Her eyes narrowed. Her head tilted. “Are you telling me that one of you
would kill another for lying with a woman?”

“For lying with someone else’s woman. It’s great dishonor.”

She shook her head, amazed. “What savages you all must be!
And do women kill women for the same cause?”

“Of course not,” said Kestrel. “A man may have several
women. They share him.”

“But men don’t share a woman?”

“Only,” said Kestrel, “if it’s a king’s woman, and the king
offers her as a gift. But Cloud, who will be king, has not—”

“You give women? As gifts?”

Now he was astonished. Her light mood had vanished. Her eyes
were blazing. She pulled away from him, recoiling as if he had said something
that made her terribly angry. She snatched up her leggings where she had cast
them, but did not even trouble to put them on before she had stalked out of the
tent.

oOo

Kestrel was still lying there when Cloud slipped through
the half-open flap. He scrambled up, seeking about wildly for something,
anything, that might serve as a weapon. But there was nothing in reach, nor
anything that he could come to before Cloud stood in front of him.

The prince-heir did not seem angry. He was, as far as
Kestrel could tell, amused. “Gods,” he said, “what a temper you’ve thrown my
clan-sister into! I haven’t seen her so angry in days.”

Kestrel’s teeth clenched. Some men smiled before they
killed. If this was one—

“What did you say to her?” Cloud asked with every appearance
of honest curiosity.

Kestrel answered truthfully, because he was mad perhaps, or
because he did not care if he lived or died. “I told her that kings among my
people give women as gifts.”

“Do they?”

“Don’t they do that here?”

Cloud shook his head. He was not angry, but he was not
delighted, either. “I suppose you said something of her being that gift.”

“Not—exactly,” Kestrel said.

“
Ai
,” said Cloud,
half amused, half dismayed. “No wonder she was in a rage. We don’t give or
trade people here, plainsman. Only cattle and food, and things made by hands.”

“But women—”

“Women are the living incarnation of Earth Mother, as men
are of Skyfather. Do you give away the earth under your feet? Do you value it
so little?”

Kestrel had long since begun to see where Sparrow got her
strange notions and odd sense of fairness in the world. “But why is Rain so
angry?” he asked, since Cloud did not seem immediately ready to kill him.

“She chose you to lie with her,” Cloud said. “She reckoned
you worthy. Some women will lie with any man, but a shaman chooses only the
best and the most beautiful. Her magic depends on it. And you let her know you think
of her as chattel—a thing to be traded, like a heifer or a shell necklace.”

Kestrel’s mouth was open. He shut it. “You knew—she—”

“She’s been talking about it since she first laid eyes on
you. She wanted to do it days ago, but I wouldn’t let her. You needed to be
stronger first.”

“But she is—your—”

“She is my clan-sister. We can make a child together, but we
can’t marry. When she takes a husband, she’ll take one from another clan. She
was thinking of taking you, but I don’t think that’s wise. You’re too
different. And,” said that astonishing man, “I think your heart beats for
another woman than Rain.”

Kestrel could think of nothing at all to say. He was in a
world unlike any he had known—except for the glimpses Sparrow had shown him. To
say his heart beat for her . . .

“I hunt that woman,” he said in a flat, hard voice. “When I
find her I am bound to kill her. As for your shaman—I am sorry I offended her.
I never meant to. Will you tell her that for me?”

“I can try,” Cloud said. He crouched down by Kestrel’s side
and inspected the scars, calmly, as if it was no matter at all that they had
lain with the same woman.

Kestrel looked him in the eyes. “Aren’t you even slightly
jealous?”

Cloud stared back, dark eyes quiet. “I suppose I could be.
I’m good enough to look at, but you are beautiful. All the women want you. But
when they’ve had their fill of you, they’ll come back to me, because you may be
splendid and foreign and therefore alluring, but I will be king.”

“What if one of them doesn’t come back? What if that one is
Rain?”

“I would be sorry for that,” Cloud said. “But even if she
never lay with me again, we’d always be bound: she as shaman, I as king.
Nothing will ever change that.”

Kestrel lowered his eyes. Cloud’s quiet voice, his serene
mind, put Kestrel to shame. Such a hunter he was, who could not keep his own
temper in check.

“There now,” said Cloud, in the same tone he used with the
children. “You come from far away, where people are different. Understanding is
hard. You’ll learn.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

“Then you don’t.” Cloud rose. “Come out into the sunlight.
You’ve been too long in the dark.”

That was true. Kestrel staggered up, stiff, gasping as he
stretched the scars over his ribs. He was still astonished that this man knew
what he had done and seemed not to care in the slightest; still faintly
convinced that he would be killed for it. But Cloud treated him exactly as
before, with quiet courtesy and a warmth that, if he let it, could be
friendship.

It did not matter what Cloud said. Kestrel would never
understand these people.

Sparrow took to calling the shaman Old Woman, since she
offered no name of her own. “That will do well enough,” she said when Sparrow
first called her that, in defiance and in some expectation of a rebuke. But Old
Woman seemed pleased.

She made no effort to hold the women prisoner, or to compel
them to stay. She simply expected them to do it. She was a shaman. She knew
what Sparrow had to admit: that her wisdom was beyond price, and Sparrow was
hungry for it.

She did not seem to teach anything. She set the women to
cleaning the shelter, sweeping out old rubbish and molding grass mats and
flea-infested furs. Then they were to weave new mats, and tan the pelts that
were stretched on racks of lath and sinew, and make new furs to sleep in. They
were also to make themselves coats out of deerhide tanned most finely; and no
matter that Sparrow did not expect to be there when the snow came. “You’ll need
it,” Old Woman said of the coat that Sparrow had begun sullenly to piece
together.

Sparrow was better at cutting and piecing than Keen. Keen
was much better at fine work: embroidery of shell and bone and stone beads,
which she would do while she listened to Old Woman telling stories; or else she
wove fine grass mats and lovely tight baskets. Her hands were always busy.